Why I am building ESQed

If you practice solo or in a small firm, do you ever have moments when you wish your team were just a little bit bigger? Or you are not the one in charge?

For me, those moments usually hit when I'm staring at a messy USPTO Office Action, often not for the first time. I've probably been racking my brain for days, silently weighing approaches, yet I remain completely stuck. Still, I know someone, somewhere, has overcome this exact problem before. But here I am, at my wits' end trying to find the right angle.

In those moments, I deeply miss my days in Big Law.

Back then, if I hit a wall, I’d just pop by a colleague’s office, leaning against the door frame, still in the hallway. The "Aha!" moment was never a legal revolution; it was just a lead. A peer would recall a weird strategy deployed years prior or an obscure line of cases they had unearthed for another matter.

That faint memory would be enough. It would give me the clue I needed to search through the firm's digital files.

Those chats weren't groundbreaking. We weren't changing the world or reinventing the law. We were just pointing each other toward a path that could work.

What Really Got Lost

But when you go solo, that "hallway wisdom" vanishes. The built-in mentors disappear, and the shared knowledge base shrinks to whatever is inside your own skull.

Not only that, it’s also the subtle things you didn't realize you were relying on.

The daily professional osmosis.

You lose the opportunity to learn just by observing how a senior partner handles a difficult client, or by listening to a colleague talk through a complex strategy over lunch. Those departmental CLE luncheons where legal theory meets real-life practice, are gone, replaced by a scramble for convenient credits at the eleventh hour.

The deeper loss is not just proximity to other professionals. With the loss of firm infrastructure, it's harder to stay sharp, let alone become better. I find myself deploying the same tried-and-true strategies, and my mental playbook stopped expanding and started repeating. I have no one to poke holes in my thinking, to ask the questions I hadn't considered, to push back and force me to defend my reasoning.

I've come to believe that the discomfort of having your thinking challenged is where real growth happens. Without that peer-to-peer conversation, and and without the camaraderie that makes intellectual pushback feel like growth instead of threat, your thinking can calcify without you even noticing.

Why AI Complacency Amplifies the Threat

Some of my colleagues think there's no point in the intellectual grind anymore. If obsolescence is inevitable because of AI and automation, they argue, mastery is pointless.

I don't fear for my own livelihood because I don't believe that the ten thousand hours required to reach true mastery can be replaced by a tool that merely generates plausible text. AI can produce the shape of a legal argument, but it cannot understand strategy, it cannot conduct nuanced logical reasoning, and it cannot read the subtle shift in a client's eyes.

But I do fear for the trajectory of our profession.

The real threat isn't AI making human lawyers obsolete; it’s AI robbing younger attorneys of their training ground. No one wants to sit there for hours reading dry transcripts or digging through dead-end cases, and AI is happily taking over that grunt work.

As a junior associate, I failed to see that the "shitty" work I had to do was actually an invisible training ground. It was where I subconsciously learned how a judge evaluated evidence, or how a seasoned attorney strategically took apart an opponent's argument. That agonizing, unglamorous labor is precisely the foundational experience that helped me, and countless other lawyers, build our legal acumen.

Now that AI is infiltrating our workflow, it allows younger lawyers to bypass that entire process, enabling them to accumulate years of practice without ever developing that mental repertoire. Will the future "human in the loop" actually have the requisite expertise to catch AI mistakes? Will they have the wisdom to lead when they've bypassed the very foundation that grooms their judgment?

We need a way to ensure we don't lose our human edge. We have to actively protect and cultivate our capacity to think.

Reclaiming the Hallway in an AI Era

That is why I am building ESQed.

I am not building another generic legal tech tool or an AI wrapper designed to automate or optimize. My goal isn't just to make us more efficient at doing our work.

My goal is to make us better lawyers tomorrow than we are today.

ESQed is an attempt to future-proof our careers by anchoring big data to real human connections. I envision a modern digital ecosystem that makes learning and using our brains an engaging, communal "edutainment" experience (think "Sesame Street for lawyers") built specifically for IP practitioners.

Here is how we are bringing the hallway back:

• A New Kind of CLE: Let’s be honest, we binge-watch random CLEs, sitting through webinars that have nothing to do with our daily practice and clicking the occasional pop-up window just to verify our presence. It's an utter waste of time. Yet, it's a tax we have to pay to maintain our licenses. ESQed is the antidote. It transforms those wasted hours into genuine self-improvement with IP-specific courses that discuss practical strategies, dissect Federal Circuit cases, and geek out on the issues only IP nerds care about.
• A Vibrant, Vetted Community: At the heart of ESQed is a community of IP attorneys who are tired of practicing in a vacuum. This is a space to bounce complex strategies off one another, share what actually works, and actively mentor the next generation of legal minds.

Ultimately, I just want my hallway back.

This is a work in progress, and I’m building it as I go. If you are tired of staring at ugly Office Actions in isolation, consider this your official invitation to step out of your office and say hello to digital hallway wisdom 2.0.