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PocketLaw, an all-in-one automated platform that enables companies to create, sign, and manage all their contracts, has raised €10 million (roughly $11 million USD) in a series A round of funding.
Founded out of Stockholm, Sweden, in 2018, PocketLaw targets SMEs with all the smarts they need to manage and automate many of their repetitive, day-to-day legal tasks.
Creating contracts and legal documents from scratch can be a resource-intensive endeavor — lawyers may charge by-the-hour to essentially repurpose existing files for a new client, while digital template banks offer an alternative solution that is a little less expensive. PocketLaw, on the other hand, promises to make the contract-creation process significantly cheaper and quicker, enabling users to build “bespoke legal agreements” in a matter of minutes through automation and a question-and-answer approach supported by on-screen digital guides.
Elsewhere, the PocketLaw platform supports features for collaborating with the various stakeholders in a legal agreement including sharing to-do lists and tasks and garnering immediate feedback, while it supports the full tracking and management of multiple agreements through the cloud.
Efficiency gains
Gartner recently predicted that companies will increase their legal technology spending to roughly 12% of their in-house budget by 2025, representing a three-fold increase on 2020 — companies are basically seeking efficiency gains by “digitizing key workflows and expanding the use of automation,” according to Gartner.
And that, effectively, is the role that PocketLaw and its legal-tech brethren see themselves playing in the coming years — freeing lawyers to carry out the more complex “lawyering” work, with automated tools taking care of the more mundane tasks.
“The regulatory landscape — and legal complexity for businesses — is growing rapidly, forcing companies to invest more time and money in legal services just to survive,” PocketLaw CEO and cofounder Kira Unger told VentureBeat. “But most day-to-day legal work consists of simple, repetitive tasks, and given the cost of massive in-house legal teams, adding more people to the problem isn’t the solution. By providing automated solutions together with high-quality templates and other content developed by lawyers, PocketLaw helps every team in a company manage ‘legal’ with efficiency and ease.”
It’s worth noting that while PocketLaw is mostly targeting smaller businesses, in reality it can be used by businesses of all sizes that are looking to optimize their internal resources — its customers include billion-dollar Norwegian media giant Schibsted.
“PocketLaw can be used by any business and any stakeholder in the world, regardless of size, financial muscle and experience,” Unger added. “However, our primary priority to date has been to support all SMEs out there for clear reasons — this is a massive market, with lots of companies in need of support on a daily basis and today – most of these businesses stand alone, without strong financial means and in-house experience to manage legal on their own.”
Prior to now, PocketLaw had raised a little over $3 million in seed funding, and with its latest cash injection the company said that it plans to scale its SaaS platform across Europe.
PocketLaw’s series A round was led by European VC juggernaut Atomico, with participation from various angel investors.
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