Startup of the Day: Romanian legal infrastructure platform Goodlegal

Goodlegal is a Burcharest-based legal infrastructure platform designed to offer an out-of-the-box legal operations framework for any company. The platform provides access to document management system, document lifecycle, e-sign among other services. To date, the company has raised a €1.2 million pre-seed funding from EarlyBird and several other investors.

In the Startup of the Day column, founder and CEO of Goodlegal Vasile Tiple shares the details about the startup’s idea, its product, and future plans.

“The Startup of the Day column on AIN.Capital is dedicated to tech projects from all sectors that originated from the CEE countries. If you would like to introduce your project, please fill in the questionnaire.”

Tell us about your startup. How does it work?

Goodlegal is a legal infrastructure platform designed to offer an out-of-the-box legal operations framework for companies. This means that any company can just create an account and have access to everything the platform offers:

• document management system to store all your legal documents (no more drive or sharepoint or lost docs on email),
• document lifecycle & e-sign (no more offline work in word or PDF, which then you need to upload to other tools to make it actionable),
• collaboration with internal and external stakeholders & workflows (keep the entire work in the same platform both for legal and non-legal users, for example, HR contracts can be managed by HR teams in the platform),
• including industry standard legal content and a specialized and trusted law firms partner network (no more working with lawyers that are not specialized in the issue a company needs support with).

The entire ecosystem, which we are building, we call Legal Infrastructure, as a user can hit the ground running with our platform day one, or we can adjust it to the specifics of that user. For example, larger companies might need certain integrations. For startups, we already have prepared a prepackaged set of documents needed to facilitate legal compliance day one, which they can freely use.

How did you come up with the startup’s idea? What was the reason/motivation behind it?

The idea of making legal easy and accessible to help companies focus on their business by becoming self-sufficient. In my previous role as UiPath as GC, I wanted to digitalize the legal work as much as possible from day one, but there wasn’t a tool to help with that. So I did what everyone is doing even today — improvised by using various tools to achieve legal objectives. After I left UiPath and started to advise various startups, I noticed the same issues I had at UiPath in 2016, for each company I needed to put in place its legal infrastructure from scratch (tools, content, etc.), reinventing the wheel each time.

This is how Goodlegal idea crystallized — to create a platform which allows you to do this at scale, thus empowering the companies to become self-sufficient.

How long did it take to reach the prototype or MVP? What did you encounter?

It took us around 9 months to do the MVP, validate it with select companies, and move to development of the production ready versions.

When exactly did you launch your product? Or when the launch is planned?

We launched it on November 23, 2022.

We invite all everyone to join Goodlegal as we are also creating an open source legal — meaning that the legal content available in the platform can be shared by users for the benefit of everyone else on the platform.

Tell us about the startup’s business model. How do you monetize your product?

We are offering a Community free version for startups and individuals who want to digitalize their work. This is extremely important as startups may or may not have funding. So having this tool for solving legal issues can help them to avoid sabotaging their future and growth by not considering the legal issues, which might occur in their activity. This will also help them to avoid a lot of issues scale-ups are facing due to not having a similar resource in place when they were startups.

The subscription version will be available for companies with large volumes of documents and legal operations needs since Q1 of 2023. Until that time, the platform will provide free services to anyone.

What are your target markets and consumers?

Our initial target are startups, because we really want to help them avoid sabotaging their growth due to legal issues. At such an early stage, we believe that startups should focus on their product and business, while legal matters are easily solved with Goodlegal.

On top of this, we are also targeting scale-ups and enterprises as they are faced with similar to startups legal issues but at a bigger scale. The legal market evolved around niche tech solutions and there are so many technologies, which only solve one specific issue, which is a nightmare for any CIO or a general counsel or a legal team.

How to consolidate the entire legal tech stack available to make sense of it internally? This is the question to which Goodlegal offers an answer. Hopefully:)

If the startup has already launched the product, what are the results: metrics, income, or any clear indicators that can be evaluated.

The number of active users, document library access, number of law firms with which we partner to address local geo specific legal issues. We already have partners in the US, Romania, Switzerland. It would be great to also find a law firm partner in Ukraine.

What about your team? How many people are working in the startup? If you’re looking for new employees, indicate whom exactly.

We are now a team of 10 and constantly looking for great developers, marketeers, and sales persons, and other vital functions, which we are just now building.

We hire in Romania, but also in the region — in particular, in Ukraine, where there are a lot of great talents, which I remember from my days as director of UiPath Ukraine after the acquisition of the Ukrainian startup StepShot by UiPath.

Have you already raised any investments? Provide us with more details on each funding round: the amount, investors, the purpose of the investment.

We raised a pre-seed of €1.2M from EarlyBird who was leading the round, Credo Ventures, Underline Ventures, and UiPath CEO Daniel Dines. The purpose was to build the team and the product fast so that we can scale globally as our platform solves an issue which exceeds borders.

What’s next? Tell us about your future plans.

We want to be the “legal operating system” for the industry and help to digitalize the work of law firms, startups, scale-ups, and enterprises. Our work is directed toward the creation of an ecosystem for anything related to document processing, removal of paperwork, and reduction of unneeded bureaucracy. We want to make legal easy and accessible to anyone.