PocketLaw Secures $11M to Automate Legal Work for SMBs

PocketLaw, an automated all-in-one platform that enables businesses to create, sign and manage all of their contracts, has raised €10 million (approx. US$11 million) in a Series A funding round.

Founded in 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden, PocketLaw caters to SMBs with all the skills 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 – attorneys can bill by the hour to essentially reuse existing files for a new client, while digital template banks offer an alternative solution that is slightly less expensive. PocketLaw, on the other hand, promises to make the contract creation process significantly cheaper and faster, by allowing users to create “tailor-made legal agreements” in minutes through automation and a question-and-answer approach, backed by screen digitizing 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 getting instant feedback while providing full tracking and management of multiple agreements across supports the cloud.

efficiency gains

Gartner recently predicted that companies will increase their legal technology spend to about 12% of their internal budget by 2025, triple what it will be in 2020 – companies are essentially looking to gain efficiencies by “digitizing key workflows and expanding the use of automation”, according to Gartner.

And that’s exactly the role PocketLaw and its legal-tech brethren aim to play in the years to come – offloading lawyers for the more complex “legal work,” while automated tools take care of the more mundane tasks.

“The regulatory landscape — and legal complexity for businesses — is expanding rapidly, forcing businesses to invest more time and money in legal services just to survive,” Kira Unger, CEO and co-founder of PocketLaw, told VentureBeat. “But most of 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 along with high-quality templates and other lawyer-developed content, PocketLaw helps every team in an organization to efficiently and easily manage “law.”

It’s worth noting that while PocketLaw is primarily aimed at smaller businesses, in reality it can be used by companies of any size looking to optimize their internal resources – its clients include the billionaire Norwegian media giant Schibsted.

“PocketLaw can be used by any company and any stakeholder anywhere in the world, regardless of size, financial strength and experience,” added Unger. “However, our overriding priority so far has been to support all SMEs out there for clear reasons – this is a huge market with many companies that need support on a daily basis and today – most of these companies are standing alone, without strong financial resources and in-house experience to manage the legal department itself.”

Previously, PocketLaw had raised just over $3 million in seed funding, and with its latest cash injection, the company announced 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.