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ALB Hot Startups is a weekly series that looks at the most promising new legal tech companies in Asia. This week, we train the spotlight on Legalese, which offers contract-drafting software.
Firm name: Legalese
Year of founding: 2015
Location: Headquartered in Singapore, it also has team members the U.S., the UK, India, Canada and Thailand.
Founders: Computer scientist Wong Meng Weng, "recovering lawyer" Alexis Natalie Chun, and startup domain expert Ong Chiahli.
What they do: Legalese is an open-source software company aiming to “eventually replace contract-drafting lawyers with contract-drafting software.”
Target market: For now, startups raising their first funds and in need of fundraising documentation.
“By some estimates, 70 percent of people who need a lawyer don’t hire one. So at the start, we’re neither competing with lawyers nor those willing to pay for one. We’re targeting users who cannot afford to hire a lawyer and thus are tempted to do-it-yourself,” one of the founders says.
Capital raised till date: Legalese has received two grants over the last year: an $8,800 String Labs Grant and a $23,000 ISIF Technical Innovation Grant. “As we were oversubscribed for our angel round, we had to split it into two tranches,” Legalese says.
Impact till date: Since it started, Legalese claims to have helped a number of startups in Singapore raise over $1 million through the first version of its concierge MVP document assembly prototype.
How the idea came about: Prior to Legalese, founders Wong and Ong were at JFDI Asia, Singapore’s first startup accelerator, where they were directly involved in helping startups with fundraising documentation, execution and advice.
Trudging through the complexities, and time-and-labour consuming preparation and execution of legal contracts and documentation, they realised that lawyers use computers to help them with the typing, but not with the thinking.
“White-collar automation is transforming many industries, and law is no exception. The history of legal informatics goes back 30 years, mostly in the academic sphere. Over the last 50 years, software engineers have developed hundreds of tools across a dozen genres, all aimed at improving productivity. By contrast, the legal industry has only two tools: Microsoft Word’s track changes, and the email attachment. But what if a programming language could be designed to express contracts as programs?” asks Chun. “What if technically sophisticated end-users could customise their contracts not by editing human-readable text in MS Word, but by editing high-level expressions then hitting ‘compile’? What if formal methods could be used to model-check and verify such contracts for completeness and consistency?”
The journey so far: Legalese’s immediate plans are two-pronged. “On the product side, we’re building Version 2 to have a more user-friendly interface, with built-in education, document dependency management, and API-integration with state registers that record companies’ information. On the research front, we are inventing L4 [the non-proprietary domain-specific language optimised for expressing legal semantics],” reveals Chun.
The research branch will, at some point, dovetail into the product branch, with Legalese building web applications (for example, fundraising documents, sale and purchase deals, service and agreements) that commercialises L4.
As Legalese scales up, it plans to expand the product workflow range laterally to cover different industries and their sector-specific documentation, and vertically to cover the documentation that comes in at different junctures of a company’s life cycle.