Handling legal work is notoriously complex and full of laborious paperwork. With the aim to empower SMEs to handle legal work with greater efficiency and ease, PocketLaw has just secured over €10 million in a round led by Atomico.
Prominent founders and operators including Personio co-founder Hanno Renner and COO Jonas Rieke, Pitch founder Christian Reber, Pleo co-founder Jeppe Rindom, Gloria Baeuerlein and the dbt Labs board member and former Gainsight COO, Allison Pickens.
Dealing with a multitude of legal requirements and increasing administrative and regulatory burdens has emerged as a significant everyday pain point for businesses. For startups, it’s a burden that often leads them to fail. According to PocketLaw, 18% of startups that fail cite unmet legal needs as a primary reason. The Swedish startup also notes that for SMEs, unmet legal needs are estimated to be worth almost £9billion – clearly it’s an area that needs some innovation and support.
This is where PocketLaw comes in – and the startup has already been regarded as an indispensable tool for any and all startup founders. Founded by Olga Beck-Friis and Kira Unger in 2018, the firm draws on both founders’ experiences with inefficient legal work. As an M&A lawyer at Mannheimer Swartling, Kira experienced first-hand the archaic nature of the legal industry and how companies lacked an easy and efficient way to solve and manage their legal needs, whereas Olga saw the potential of digitisation and how other industries had benefited from technology while working as a management consultant.
PocketLaw CEO and co-founder, Kira Unger, explained: “The majority of day-to-day legal work is simple, recurring tasks – despite this businesses currently spend an endless amount of time and resources handling contracts manually and inexpertly, and spend a considerable sum of money soliciting professional legal advice.”
The startup offers a SaaS platform for contract creation and management with hundreds of templates which empowers every team within an organisation to create contracts and navigate legal needs with confidence. PocketLaw’s all-in-one solution brings together all of the processes and tools needed for SMEs to handle legal on a day-to-day basis – from legal discovery, to contract creation, to execution and storage. Non-legal and legal specialists alike can create contracts immediately, which are wholly tailored to their requirements and needs. Through PocketLaw’s platform, they can do so 80% faster and to a fraction of the costs of traditional legal services.
Kira Unger continued: “Using technology to build scalable, user-friendly tools is the only way companies will be able to maintain speed whilst keeping up with an increasingly complex regulatory landscape. We estimate that our customers save up to fourteen working weeks and up to $200,000 in legal fees a year by using our intuitive, tech-enabled solutions.”
Underpinning PocketLaw’s automation is proprietary content that guides users along every step of their legal creation journey. From discovering and navigating legal needs to suggesting actions to take on documents and contracts, the platform aims to keep it simple and accessible.
Already, the young company is trusted by thousands of companies across Europe – from startups like Voi and Juni to enterprises like Babybjorn and Schibsted. This fresh funding will drive expansion across Europe and support the ongoing efforts to scale the PocketLaw team of legal, technical and operational experts.
David Grünbaum, Head of Legal at Babybjorn commented: “With PocketLaw, I can be sure that we maintain our standard without having to review every single contract drafted [in the organisation]”.
Atomico Partner Ben Blume, added: “This is the first time we have seen a tool really designed with the needs of business owners in mind, empowering them with access to everything they need in one place, in a world where most teams are still forced to buy multiple fragmented solutions, work in silos, or pay high legal fees to outside experts”.
