Blue Ocean Global Technology Interviews Alexander Paykin

Alexander Paykin is the Managing Director and sole owner of The Law Office of Alexander Paykin, P.C., where he oversees a consultancy serving law firms, a real estate brokerage, and a holding company. Specializing in litigation and complex transactions, his firm prioritizes client-centric, high-tech services. Additionally, Alexander educates fellow attorneys through Continuing Legal Education (CLE) courses and contributes to several legal publications. Committed to community service, he serves on three non-profit boards and actively participates in Rotary. His memberships include the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, and others.

Blue Ocean: Tell us about your professional life and what inspired you to pursue law.

Alexander Paykin: My journey to the legal profession was shaped by a few pivotal moments in my life. When I was just nine years old, my family embarked on a journey of immigration from the Soviet Union. The U.S. government had extended an invitation to all Jews to leave, with the implicit promise of guaranteed visas. However, the path was not straightforward. We had to transit through Italy, where we faced the uncertainty of a separate visa application process.

Thousands and thousands of us found ourselves stranded in Italy for nearly a year, with no financial means to support ourselves. My parents took on whatever menial jobs they could find just to make ends meet. Just as hopelessness began to set in, a high-priced attorney in an expensive suit arrived in our town and gathered all the immigrants for a Q&A session. He promised to submit our applications, touting his impressive approval record, but it came at a substantial cost. My parents scraped together every penny they could, even borrowing from family and friends, to pay this attorney.

Months passed in silence, and panic began to set in as my parents feared they had been swindled. But then, a letter arrived from the attorney’s office, congratulating us on the approval of our application and outlining the next steps. That moment, witnessing the profound impact a lawyer could have on the lives of my family and others, stayed with me.

Fast forward to my American high school years, where I reignited the school’s mock trial team, which had disbanded due to a lack of interest in prior years. Going door-to-door through the classrooms to garner interest, I managed to assemble a team and served as its de facto captain for three years. The experience of running the team and participating in mock trials fueled my passion for law, particularly litigation.

In high school, I realized I’d taken all of the interesting AP classes and fulfilled all my high school graduation obligations after my junior year, except for a fourth year of gym. After not getting anywhere in asking for early graduation and perhaps too eager to become an adult, I drafted a lawsuit and threatened to sue my high school. Once they saw that I was serious in my threats, I negotiated a deal with them that allowed me to start college a year early on the condition that I took two semesters of physical education in my first year of college. When I told my parents, they were confused and surprised (seeing as I had told them nothing of my plan until after I had completed the negotiations and gotten accepted to SUNY’s Stony Brook University), but the whole experience was fun.

Though I initially pursued computer science in college and even started an IT company developing custom software for lawyers and doctors, the scarcity of tech opportunities when I graduated in 2002, right after the tech bubble burst, led me to reconsider my path. I decided to attend law school, where I discovered my true calling in litigation – the thrill of working with witnesses, depositions, and evidence, and those eureka moments that come with it.

After law school, I briefly ran a financial consulting company with two friends, but legislative changes forced us to reconsider the business model. I then pivoted to working as an associate attorney in real estate and commercial litigation to gain more experience. Concurrently, I established my own practice, expanding into various areas of law as the years went on. Today, my firm is growing, and we’re broadening our scope from being a primarily litigation and complex transactions firm focusing on real estate and commercial law, to include related practice areas, such as bankruptcy, immigration, employment, trusts, and estate law.

Blue Ocean: What does your typical day today look like?

Alexander Paykin: I don’t have a typical day. Emails start the minute I wake up. How the day goes from there is usually determined by the content of the emails and the various calls I place and receive in the first hour of the day. I always check in with my senior paralegal and usually one or two of my associate attorneys, just to make sure time-sensitive tasks are all on track.  On any given day, I may be in court, in one of our offices, working remotely at a client location or from home, or traveling to attend various committee and board meetings, teach at professional conferences, or consult on an out-of-state matter. Peppered into the day are continuous phone calls and emails, not to mention text messages, WhatsApp messages, LinkedIn inquiries, and the like. On a good day, I’m home before 8 pm. When traveling and teaching, my firm travels with me, since we are completely cloud-based and I have full access to all firm resources from all of my mobile devices.

Blue Ocean: What is one trend in your industry that excites you?

Alexander Paykin: Right now, in the technology aspect, artificial intelligence is thrilling. The things I can accomplish with tools like Claude.ai in mere seconds, which used to take hours, are nothing short of amazing. AI is completely transforming the legal landscape, with its applications in document review, document automation, drafting, and more, offering tremendous benefits and very low barriers to entry.

I believe that in the future, the best lawyers will also be computer programmers, which puts me in an advantageous position, given my undergraduate degree and coding experience. When I teach others how to properly engineer a prompt within Claude that is suitable for professional use, I often find that people struggle and take some time to grasp it, if they are able to get the hang of it at all.

Of course, there are some pitfalls for lawyers who don’t cross-check the work or research provided by AI tools, using the technology incorrectly and potentially giving it a bad reputation. While these issues need to be addressed, I see immense potential in AI and recognize that the problems are mostly with the users. Tasks that once took hours can now be completed and reviewed in under 30 minutes, greatly enhancing work efficiency and allowing lawyers to take on twice as many cases in the same number of hours. Ultimately, this can lead to improved access to justice and increased affordability for a much larger number of people.

Blue Ocean: How have you differentiated yourself and what contributed to your success, in your opinion?

Alexander Paykin: I believe my early adoption of various forms of technology has been a key differentiator. I run my firm much more like an IT startup, investing in the latest tech, rather than a traditional law firm, which will only upgrade technology when absolutely forced into doing it. I always emphasize to my clients across the world that we are a high-tech, cloud-based digital firm. They won’t encounter a situation where someone says they don’t have access to information because they’re out of the office or the files are back at the office and they can always have access to see their matter live.

Being a tech-savvy lawyer has helped me attract numerous high-tech clients, including individuals from Google and IBM. These clients appreciate technology, particularly the cost savings and quality improvements we can provide as a result. Developing a reputation like that takes time, but at this point, our Google reviews alone (let alone our various awards) speak to the fact that we’re on the right track.

Blue Ocean: What is something unique you offer to your clients?

Alexander Paykin: One unique aspect we offer our clients is the assurance that we are not a nine-to-five firm. They can send us an email and would not be surprised by a reply outside of business hours or call us at any hour of the day or night and be triaged for emergencies by our reception staff. We go out of our way to accommodate our clients’ needs – be it a 12-hour difference in time zones, a work schedule that does not permit calls during weekdays, or in-person meetings that require me to jump on a series of connecting flights to end up in Romania for an emergency transaction signing, our clients know that we will bend over backward for them.  

And yes, I have in fact flown to Romania just to complete a 3-minute document signing in the airport terminal and fly out on the same flight I flew in on, 3 hours later.  I truly pride myself on the fact that my firm provides a level of responsiveness and care that most law firms wouldn’t even consider.

Blue Ocean: What advice would you give to your younger self?

Alexander Paykin: I would say that the most important thing in life is to have both vision and drive. Provided you know what you want to achieve, the rest is easy by comparison. One of the greatest challenges in life is figuring out what it is that you truly want. Once you settle in on your objective, make your plan. Break the plan down into parts, identify the tasks necessary to address each part, and get to work. Spending too much time planning doesn’t leave you with enough time to accomplish what you plan, but not taking the time to identify your actual goals and build an intelligent plan to accomplish them leaves you wasting your time and energy on activities – without achievement.

Blue Ocean: Please share your favorite quotation.

Alexander Paykin: I have two favorite quotes, both from Douglas Adams. In one of his books, while describing a spaceship hovering, or rather, multiple spaceships hovering over various cities of the world, he wrote, “The ships hung in the sky in much the same way bricks don’t.” I love that use of language, employing a contradictory statement. It never fails to amuse me.

Another quote from Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is one that I often use to describe particularly shrewd, successful, and intelligent people, especially those who impress me: “He’s the kind of person who can follow you through a revolving door and come out first.”

I can come up with 50 more, and at least 45 will be from Douglas Adams’ various books. His use of language and his ability to present a problem from an entirely unexpected perspective, have helped me learn to look at all of life, whether my personal life or any of my client’s cases, from many angles, many of them unorthodox, often with amazing results.