Singapore startup’s audacious goal to create a programming language for the legal industry

Legalese co-founders Wong Meng Weng (far right) and Alexis Chun with Walden International representatives. Photo credit: Legalese.

Setting up a business involves a lot of legal paperwork. More so if you’re fundraising. For a company that’s just starting out, that simply means a great amount of time consumed and serious expense.

Singapore-based Legalese wants to cure those headaches by automating the creation of legal documents. This is faster and way cheaper than hiring a lawyer to draft the contract from scratch using old software like Word.

Today, the startup announced it secured over US$415,000 in angel “funding commitments,” led by Singapore-based VC firm Walden International.

Bots do the trick

Legalese has grand plans. Unlike Rocket Lawyer or Dragon Law, which allow superficial customizations of legal templates, Legalese goes much deeper. It wants to redefine how legal documents are written in the first place – and it’s open-sourcing its technology.

Here’s what it’s creating:

• A specialized programming language (or domain-specific language) for legal contracts, called L4.
• A “compiler” which converts the code into legal documents that are written in plain English (or other languages).
• Apps built on top of the programming language and the compiler for a variety of legal scenarios. The company’s first app, a Google Spreadsheet, is for startups raising early-stage rounds.

How does the app work? All a user needs to do is fill out the spreadsheet and it will generate the contracts that they need.

So if you’re raising a seed round, you’ll need to input pertinent information about your company and the parties you’re dealing with and fill out the capitalization table.

Legalese will then generate the contracts. The startup says its bots turn those contracts into PDF files and delete their copies, assuring confidentiality. No human intervention is involved.

No need to hire lawyers

“Two in three small businesses needing legal services cannot afford a lawyer. So they DIY. They copy from friends and write agreements themselves,” says co-founder Ong Chiah Li. “But using found templates is risky. Our web apps will help users to DIY with confidence: configuring the terms, verifying the content, capturing the parties’ details, generating the PDFs, and even chasing for signatures.”

Chiah Li previously worked at Expara-IDM Ventures in Singapore, and at JFDI.Asia, the city-state’s first startup accelerator.

Legalese started as a pet project at JFDI.Asia in 2013, and spun out in 2015. “The need for something like Legalese became obvious during my time at JFDI; during peak periods we’d be making a dozen investments in a single month. Law firms would have charged an arm and a leg! We looked for software that could handle the volume, but we couldn’t find any. So we wrote some software ourselves,” Chiah recalls.

Since then, the product has helped more than 30 startups produce paperwork for over US$1.5 million in funding. Legalese used its own product to close its angel round.

“That’s what Silicon Valley calls eating your own dog food!” Chiah quips.

A multibillion-dollar market

Chiah set up the firm together with Wong Meng Weng, JFDI.Asia’s founder and a computer scientist, and Alexis Chun, a litigator who previously worked at TSMP Law Corporation and Rajah & Tann, two of Singapore’s most prominent law firms.

After being named fellow at Harvard Law’s Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society, Meng says he’s been talking with postdocs and faculty at Harvard and at the MIT about their programming language “for tomorrow’s lawyers to code in.”

“After we close this round of investment, the clock is ticking, and we’re on the hook: in the next 12 months our job is to turn capital into revenue, launch the product commercially, and strengthen the source of our competitive advantage, our core IP which supports the rest of our tech stack. That means talking to PhDs.”

“If our revenue experiments are successful, we’ll be in a good position to raise a seed round in late 2017,” he adds.

Walden executive director Yong Soo Ping says the opportunity is huge – “the legal industry is worth about US$400 billion a year, and it runs on expensive manual labor.” She doesn’t cite whether this market is global, but according to consulting firm Legal Transformation Institute the figure pertains to the US.

Despite Legalese’s potential, Alexis believes that bots will never completely replace lawyers. “That’s not going to happen. As an ex-litigator myself, I don’t expect an AI to argue court cases. But when it comes to business contracts, small businesses prefer online solutions over traditional law firms.”

The founders are yet to respond to our queries about the funding and the company’s performance.

Converted from Singapore dollars. US$1 = SGD 1.44.

This post Singapore startup’s audacious goal to create a programming language for the legal industry appeared first on Tech in Asia.

from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/singapore-legalese-audacious-goal-to-create-a-programming-language-for-the-legal-industry
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