Sprintlaw races ahead with $1.2 million capital raise for legal tech

What began as a bootstrapped project to transform legal services through automation has now successfully raised $1.2 million to fund further innovation.

Founded in Sydney by Alex Solo (pictured left) and Tomoyuki Hachigo (pictured right) in 2017, online-based Sprintlaw has developed more than 100 custom-built intelligent bots to automate legal tasks and assisted more than 7,000 businesses.

Revenue has grown by 250 per cent in 2019 with positive feedback for the group's cloud-based legal knowledge management tool 'Sprintyard', as well the enterprise legal solution Sprintlaw Counsel for outsourcing that was launched in August.

"We've tried to automate all the different workflows of lawyers from gathering instructions to putting together documents, which is traditionally a manual process," Solo tells Business News Australia.

"There's been a real hunger I think for innovative legal service providers and people are very keen to work with us - it just makes it a lot a lot easier and sort of refreshing to deal with lawyers that are actually tech savvy for once," says Solo, who along with Hachigo won the Legal category at the Sydney Young Entrepreneur Awards 2019. 

"Our vision is to really be the leading Australian small business legal service provider, and to achieve that we wanted to scale as quickly as possible and acquire as many customers as we as we can."

Hence the equity raise, which started with a convertible note mid-year so Sprintlaw has already put its development plans in motion, but now with the support of unnamed strategic angel investors the round has been completed.

Both Sprintyard and Sprintlaw Counsel have been gaining traction; the former helps lawyers find documents for clients, while the latter has proved useful for in-house legal teams, law firms and corporate businesses alike.

"We built a portal for our enterprise businesses to use to submit tasks and treat us as an extension of their internal team using the technology, so they can just pass legal tasks over to our team and manage them in real-time and collaborate," says Solo.

"Unlike traditional firms, we've put a big focus on customer experience as the driving factor of our business with the NPS (net promoter score) being the main metric for all of our teams we basically want to maintain a perfect 5-star Google rating in everything we've done."

With extra funds, Sprintlaw will continue on the same course with more automating of legal tasks and developing its technology.

"What we've done is we've created for the small business market a collection of packages and products, so we're looking to build service-specific automation," says Solo.

"For example, if we work for a gym and we're preparing a gym's terms and conditions, we're going to create bots specific to those sorts of agreements that can just automatically create them.

"That will allow us to provide them at scale and we're going to be doing that consistently across all of our different products of which I think we've got about 150 now."

Keeping an eye on security

Client confidentiality is a fundamental value in the law with grave consequences if that confidence is breached. So how then does a legal tech company ensure that those same principles are upheld with the implementation of new technology?

We put this question to Solo, who actually argues Sprintlaw's algorithms offer more protection than your standard small start-up law firm.

"Being a technology provider, business security is one of those core things so it's about making sure in the infrastructure that we build that everything is super tight, super secure or controlled by us," he says.

"We have a risk committee in the business reviewing all the technology, where the documents are hosted and making sure that things aren't vulnerable to security risks."

"I think the security measures that we've put in will be significantly higher than what you get from a traditional small business start-up.

"The pieces of script written by us that perform legal tasks, they're probably more reliable than a lawyer because human error is actually the biggest way that things go wrong when there are leaks by automating it you can have confidence in the process that it will be done the same way every time."

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Business News Australia