From Biglaw to Big Win: The Associate Behind Bloomberg Industry Group’s Latest Tech Acquisition

You’d be hard-pressed to find an attorney who loves the daily slog through email and trying to keep track of the myriad of deliverables and assignments.  In fact, it’s a universal pain point for associates, partners, and corporate attorneys alike, but law firms have historically been reluctant to quickly adopt the latest technologies to their advantage.   However, one entrepreneur leveraged a unique insight to develop a project management tool that overhauled how lawyers work – a success that led Bloomberg Industry Group to acquire his company last April.  

Mat Rotenberg is the co-founder of Dashboard Legal, a forward-looking solution that enhances collaboration for attorneys, streamlining their work, improving accuracy, and creating dynamic workspaces. Its features include real-time updated project checklists, project tracking boards, chat channels, collaborative notes, and other ways to simplify work for staff at all levels.  

Dashboard Legal also seamlessly integrates with law firms’ existing email and document management systems, which was essential to “meet lawyers where they are,” says Rotenberg.  

“Most lawyers are used to working analog and are handling complex deals and cases in a needlessly tedious way (aka email) because that’s how things have traditionally been done. But we realized there was a better way to embrace AI to automate workflows and provide lawyers with more advanced tools to manage their tasks productively.”  

Rotenberg’s journey to developing the platform, which would later be bought by Bloomberg Industry Group, was the result of his vision and effort to modernize the legal industry through technological innovation.  Drawing on his own experiences working at premier law firms Skadden and Akin Gump, he charted the future of what would become Dashboard Legal, with a forward-looking focus on technology.  

Despite the potential benefits of AI and automation, law firms have been slow to adopt such innovations, as the American Bar Association recently noted. Concerns about confidentiality, ethics, and even ingrained opposition to moving swiftly to benefit from technological advancements have hindered growth and steps to simplify work. Having worked in the industry, Rotenberg knew this, and the pain of current workflows personally. 

His knowledge of how lawyers work, combined with a vision for how things could be improved, gave him the confidence to start the uncertain but ambitious process of co-founding Dashboard Legal with CTO Fedor Garin, as noted in a recent Medium post.  

The post charts the course of Rotenberg’s story, from the May 2020 co-founding of Dashboard Legal to the acquisition by Bloomberg Industry Group – where he has been serving as the director of workflow solutions since April 2024, based in New York City.  

Before embarking on his first-ever role as an entrepreneur at the age of 32, Rotenberg interviewed 50 lawyers about their workflows and project management needs. From those interviews, and his own experiences and research, he was able to shape the concept for Dashboard Legal.  

“I bet on myself. Then hundreds of you out there bet on me as well,” he writes in the Medium post, which charts the path from the initial idea through to the Bloomberg Law acquisition. “I also worked for 7 years [as a lawyer] then put everything on the line for this idea, because I believe in this mission of making lawyers’ interactions with technology less tedious.”  

Rotenberg writes that leveraging a decade of hard work into his entrepreneurial pivot was the right decision. This was not only improving law firms that use Dashboard Legal but also bringing about beneficial change in his own life. “For me, the move to entrepreneurship allowed me to grow. I had to accept the insecurity of not working for a large institution and accept not having a regular paycheck. In return, I lived my life with optimism, gratitude, and grit. These are gifts I cherish,” he writes.