Jum Balea · · 4 min readSingapore 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. Of the amount, about US$210,000 has been wired.
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 / DSL) for legal contracts, called L4.
- A “compiler” which converts the code into legal documents that are written in plain English (or other languages).
- Web apps built on top of the DSL and compiler for a variety of legal scenarios. The first app, involving Google sheets, is for startups raising early-stage rounds.
How does the app work? All a user needs to do is fill out a 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.
“Backed by our DSL, the paperwork generated on Legalese apps are not just dumb templates stitched together by auto-complete fields, it goes much further than that. A DSL essentially gives Legalese contracts a formal, computer-readable representation of the parties’ intent,” the company tells Tech in Asia in an email response.
“This means that Legalese paperwork can be internally checked for correctness and consistency, and the paperwork can talk to each other. For example, a convertible note can read a series A funding document and convert accordingly,” it explains.
Unifying computer science and law is at the heart of the whole concept – and Legalese says it has been done before. Adobe is the leader in the category of the printed page and its first product was not Photoshop or Illustrator, but Postscript, the language.
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.”
A multibillion-dollar market
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