This month’s Legaltech news’ Women of Legal Tech series features Rosanna Garcia, CEO of Vijilent. The new company provides online people searches and social media discovery via artificial intelligence).

Vijilent has been selected for the second round of the LexisNexis Legal Tech Acceleration Start-Up program, lead by Lex Machina CEO Josh Becker.

Women of Legal Tech — Rosanna Garcia 1

 

In the interview, Garcia discusses a wide range topics, from her first job at McDonald’s to her start up; to dealing with sexism; finding great mentors and offering advice to young women.

 

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Most recent accomplishment: Launching my company, Vijilent, at the American Bar Association’s 2017 LegalTech show in Chicago. Vijilent uses artificial intelligence and natural language process to provide a fast method (about 30 seconds) for gathering people insights based on their social media presence. Our Data-Portraits contain basic demographic information as well as IBM-Watson driven personality assessments. We automate the tedious process of conducting google searches on people allowing lawyers and their staff to focus on the skills they do best—build winning cases.

At the podium: I’ve presented at many conferences on women entrepreneurs but I’m proud of my February 2017 publication in International Legal Technology Association’s (ILTA) newsletter on artificial intelligence, “Meet the Algorithms: AI is Joining Your Firm.”

Women of Legal Tech — Rosanna Garcia 3

 

Book that inspired you? Steve Jobs: The Journey is the Reward, by Jeffrey Young. It gave me a new perspective on life, to understand that there were no wrong paths for me but how I reached my goal was most important. I went from engineering to marketing, now to legal tech—what a fun journey!

Work tips re: “managing up:” Women usually don’t negotiate as well as men in their first jobs, and that often stays with them throughout their career. As a result, they are paid lower salaries. Take a negotiations class — so that when you are asking for a new job or a raise, you will have more “ammunition” in negotiating with your boss.

Favorite charities: I donate to Kiva, a microlending site, and to Watsi, a medical treatment site. At Kiva, I supported a woman entrepreneur. At Watsi, I paid for the cataract surgery for a woman in a rural community. Without her eyes she could not farm; without farming she could not support her family. My small donation has hopefully made a big impact on both women and their communities.

Monica Bay is a Fellow at CodeX and a freelance journalist. She was Editor-in-Chief of Law Technology New (now Legaltech news) at ALM for 17 years (and 13 years at The Recorder (San Francisco). She is a member of the California bar.  Email: mbay@codex.stanford.edu. Twitter: @MonicaBay,

Cover image: Clipart.com