Before he built an AI for lawyers, Rowan McNamee took the notes himself — sitting across from people mid-divorce, writing down their custody disputes by hand.
Rowan co-founded Mary Technology, an Australian legal-tech startup that turns thousands of pages of case documents into chronologies, summaries and reports. He walks through the failed first prototype that gave lawyers 300 ways to use a transcript when they only wanted one, why Mary turns down every transactional and M&A case to stay purely litigation and disputes, the architecture built to stop AI hallucinating across thousands of documents, what changed in him once real clients' worst moments were riding on getting it right, and why the company is named after his aunt.
0:00 Intro & Cold Open
0:20 Notes From a Divorce Case
2:13 Why Lawyers Skipped Standard Note-Takers
4:37 What Mary Technology Is Today
5:30 The Big Red Button: First Prototype
6:42 The Pivot: Stop Building for Everyone
9:07 Solving AI's Memory & Hallucination Problem
12:24 Why AI Won't Replace Lawyers
14:47 Litigation Only: Drawing the Hard Line
17:29 The Hardest Fundraise: 18 Months In
20:51 Round Two, Round Three, and Getting "Undeniable"
23:56 Building a Company With Your Best Friend
25:29 How Founding Changed Him
27:10 Naming the Company After His Aunt
28:27 Regrets, Mistakes, and Skipping Law School
