Karina Vazirova on chess, regtech and disruption

Karina Vazirova is the founder of KV Labs – a digital product agency, where she helps businesses get the most out of technology. Her current focuses on highly regulated, fast-growing companies that are looking to optimize their compliance function with tech.

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In legal, to me, it will be about the challenger law firms… just have to flip a few things upside down. And, introduce a disruptive new model of doing business in this space. And that will happen in law, and you see this already, you see this with, for example, Deloitte legal, coming out. And there are a few new-law law firms, as well that are in this space and are trying different models.

We recorded this conversation in Feb 2020, and of course, the world changed dramatically since then. As an accompaniment, I would recommend watching Karina’s talk at the Fringe Legal Virtual Summit, where she shares how to run successful SaaS implementation projects.

In technology, when you’re building products and in any industry that you look at that has been disrupted and innovated over time, all of them share in common, failing fast and trying different things. And you know, they say only 1 in 10 disruptors or startups will work out. The other nine will fail, but you kind of need that churn, that turnover in the markets of different players trying and failing and learning from each other in order to get that 1 out of 10 that is successful.

And that is true in a market, and it’s also true within an individual organization where if you don’t have that culture of trying failing, then it’s much harder to learn from mistakes and it is much harder to finally get to a solution that works.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• Karina’s journey to becoming a chess master
• Going from chess to legal tech to reg tech to founding her own agency
• What is reg tech, and the importance of compliance
• The three pillars of KV Labs and why they matter: design, build and launch
• Importance of UI/UX in product design
• The concept of challenger law firms, and how they might disrupt the legal profession

It’s just that inevitably compliance is becoming more and more a strategic function. It’s no longer just about knowing what you can and cannot do and responding to internal requests. it is just inevitable becoming more strategic because the industry is becoming more complex as well. And that’s what RegTech is really about – at the end of the day, enabling that function.

You can learn more about KV Labs here, and find Karina on LinkedIn and Twitter.