Robert Ambrogi Blog
Two former BigLaw M&A attorneys have launched a legal tech startup aimed at addressing one of the profession’s most persistent challenges — the gap between law school education and the practical skills needed to succeed in transactional practice.
Rubi Legal Training, founded by co-CEOs Madison Keeble (pictured left above) and Geetika Jerath (pictured right), officially launched last week with a virtual apprenticeship platform designed to train junior lawyers in transactional law.
The Austin-based startup has already secured a significant institutional partnership, with the University of Texas School of Law providing its entire student body with access to the platform.
The founders built rubi — they lowercase the name — based on what they learned from their combined experiences as M&A associates at law firm Norton Rose Fulbright, which is that new transactional lawyers often struggle without structured training in the practical aspects of deal work.
“Madison and I drew on the most valuable lessons from our 25,000+ billable hours in BigLaw, reverse-engineered them into exactly what a junior M&A lawyer needs to know, and built a platform that teaches it all upfront,” Jerath said in announcing the launch.
The platform’s flagship program, “The Transactional Practice Guide: M&A,” aims to take a new lawyer and train them to operate at the level of a second-year associate. During two years of curriculum development and pilot testing, the founders discovered demand for the training extended beyond new associates to include boutique firm attorneys, in-house counsel and experienced lawyers switching practice areas.
Apprenticeship Reimagined
Rubi’s approach simulates the experience of working as a junior associate on a BigLaw transaction, the company says. Participants are “staffed” on Project Rubi, a comprehensive mega-deal designed specifically for learning, with step-by-step guidance from the founders through every task, decision and document.
“It’s as if Geetika and I are at their desks, teaching not just substantive concepts and what to do, but why they’re doing it, what questions to ask, and how everything fits into the bigger picture, using a full purchase agreement and transaction documents to build judgment in context,” Keeble said.
The program is structured in digestible units that take 10-15 hours to complete and fit into busy schedules. Assignments progressively build on each other, covering everything from managing competing priorities to analyzing change of control provisions and drafting transaction checklists and ancillary documents.
Texas Law Partnership
The University of Texas School of Law, working with its Texas Law and Business Program, has signed on to provide all law students with access to rubi.
“Our program bridges the gap between legal education and the realities of transactional practice,” Eliot Cotton, director of the Texas Law and Business Program, said in a statement provided by the company.
“Rubi is designed to help students develop skills that have traditionally taken years in a firm to learn: context, structure and a clear understanding of how deals actually work. Providing this platform for our students is a tremendous opportunity for us, and we’re excited to get started.”
Jerath and Keeble, who both earned their bachelor’s degrees from UT Austin, said the partnership “is deeply meaningful” to them both. “By offering rubi to every student at Texas Law before they even enter the profession,” Jerath said, “Texas Law is demonstrating its continued commitment to giving its students a competitive edge.”
Plans to Scale
The platform can be used by individual lawyers working independently or deployed institution-wide at law firms or law schools. According to the founders, the program establishes a consistent baseline of skills and knowledge while teaching lawyers how to adapt to their specific team’s preferences.
“Once rubi is deployed at a firm or law school, the training runs itself,” Keeble said. “It’s designed to work alongside on-the-job learning: students use it to stand out in recruiting and prepare for summer associate positions, practicing lawyers apply new skills and add value to their deals immediately, and senior lawyers can focus on higher-level work while their teams develop systematically.”
The startup plans eventually to add training programs for other practice areas, Keeble told me.
“Our M&A program is the flagship, but the broader vision is to build a cohesive training ecosystem, scaling horizontally into additional practice areas and vertically into mid-level and senior progression,” she said.
“We’re being intentional about sequencing so every program meets the same standard of structure, depth and practical relevance.”