LawCanvas provides startups with ready-to-go legal documents, saves you thousands of dollars

The early days of founding a startup are always the most fun, as any entrepreneur will tell you. Coming up with outrageous ideas, splattering them across whiteboards in glorious vagueness, and chowing on instant noodles together – veterans recount these moments with smiles on their faces.

Then comes the registration of the company, and suddenly everything gets serious. Given the proliferation of stories of founders getting ousted without a cent to their name (Noah Glass, anyone?), legal agreements can be a matter of life and death – or millions of dollars. For this reason, many well-meaning old-timers strongly suggest that founders get a startup lawyer in to settle all legal matters right from the start.

Of course, if you’re a fresh-faced entrepreneur right out from college, the millions are probably the last thing from your mind. Just the idea of starting a company probably seems incredible enough to hold your full attention, let alone putting in a few thousand dollars to bring in a legal professional.

According to Daniel Leong, founder and CEO of legal web service LawCanvas, the market rate for a standard website terms of service stands at about S$3,000 (US$2,400). That might not seem like much to most, but when you’re a fledgling graduate without a penny in your pocket and tons of debt, you’ll definitely think twice about spending your limited funds on what might seem like luxury.

Enter LawCanvas, the web service that wants to save nascent entrepreneurs thousands of dollars when they most need it. It does this by helping small businesses create legal documents quickly and easily by providing a library of free legal templates tailored for Singapore, with a smart editor that they claim makes editing clauses a cinch.

Their library currently includes six types of important documents: non-disclosure agreements, employee agreements, founders agreement, advisor agreement, website terms of services, and website privacy policy. “The most popular documents on our platform right now are ‘everyday’ business documents like non-disclosure agreements and employment letters,” Leong says.

Beyond these templates, he adds that the team has been seeing some demand and interest in other niche areas, such as investment documents. “We’re looking to include them when we expand our document library in the near future.”

See: Singapore startups, use these open-source investment templates, save yourselves from grief

Forget DIY

Founders would ask: why not do it myself instead? But actually getting down to sourcing closest competitors, finding their documents, and copying and pasting details to fit their situation is a maddeningly tedious process, according to Leong.

“The issue is that you can often spend five to six hours working on this in one go, and you’re not even sure if what you’re doing is correct,” he explains. “It’s frustrating and tedious, and we’d much rather be working on our businesses.” Copying overseas competitors would often yield the additional problem of applicability to the local market, Leong adds.

To date, hundreds of small businesses have used the web service, and the feedback has been generally positive. “LawCanvas has been live for about three months now, since May 2014, [and there has been] a steady stream of new users coming in everyday,” Leong enthuses. This is rather impressive, given that the team has not done any marketing for now – growth has come about largely through word-of-mouth.

Doubt from the legal community