• Bucharest-based Googdlegal, a platform that speeds up legal processes to achieve compliance, has raised a pre-seed funding round of €1.2M.
• Earlybird Digital East is the leading investor, joined by Czech Credo Ventures, Romanian Underline Ventures, and UiPath co-founder and CEO, Daniel Dines.
• Goodlegal aims to become a global player for startups, small law firms, and solopreneurs; but also a long-term solution for enterprises to define their workflows.
“We are starting our journey to reinvent legal and help our customers to focus on their business, develop great products, and become self-sufficient. Our mission is to make legal easy, accessible, and actionable,” Vasile Tiple, co-founder and CEO of Goodlegal, shares in the official press release.
Goodlegal allows both law firms and in-house lawyers to create legal documents, store them, and vet them to be up-to-date with the latest regulations. Amongst the functionalities, there are drag-and-drop document builders, editor and text analysis, e-signature, automation functionalities, and integrations to achieve legal compliance.
Small and big companies can configure their dashboard and delegate tasks to team members while leveraging the Goodlegal Community to exchange templates. Through different integrations, companies can create a Goodlegal ecosystem, no matter their size or industry.
Their goal with this funding round is to scale the solution globally and develop a network of partners to offer geo-specific content for each country they will scale in, beginning with Romania.
The UiPath Alumni Network
“In my previous role at UiPath, I wanted to digitalize the legal work as much as possible. But there wasn’t a tool to help with that, so I improvised by using various tools to achieve legal objectives,” Vasile Tiple says.
Goodlegal was launched in 2021 by co-founders Vasile Tiple, Alexandru Caciulescu, Alexandru Tataran, and Ioana Teleanu. All four of them are UiPath Alumni.
Vasile Tiple has a background in Law, has worked as Head of Legal at UiPath, and he is also a Crew Capital advisor, a VC co-founded by Daniel Dines and Brandon Deer, UiPath’s Chief Strategy Officer.
Alexandru Caciulescu has a background in computer engineering and has previously worked as a senior software security engineer at UiPath. Alex Tataran has a background in software engineering and management and has worked as a senior sales engineer at UiPath. Ioana Teleanu has a background in management and is a UX Manager at UiPath.
Goodlegal is joining a global movement for the digitalization of legal workflows, which most times are quite repetitive. Globally, the legal tech market generated revenues of over €27B, and it’s expected to reach over €35B by 2027.
Other companies with Romanian DNA that propose solutions for the law vertical are Avocatoo, which connects users with lawyers, and Juridiq, which helps with document administration, management of jurisprudence, and follow-ups.
In the short interview below, Vasile Tiple shares his views about automation for lawyers, how the Goodlegal solution work for tech startups, and why the team is ready to go global.
The Recursive: What pain points can automation solve for lawyers or legal workers?
Vasile Tiple: Automation can mean streamlining a legal process by making it digital end-to-end. But it can also be robotic process automation – actual software robots doing the clicks and the action a human would do in a specific process.
A definition that considers both elements can address the biggest legal workers’ pains as any type of legal work also has a strategic analytical thinking side and an operational one. The operational side should be automated as much as possible from repetitive manual tasks, such as copy-pasting certain information in legal documents using a bot for FAQs or database inquiries.
The potential is huge, which in part is triggered also by the industry’s resistance to tech and change.
What inspired the launch of Goodlegal?
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 need to put in place its legal infrastructure from scratch (e.g. tools, content) – reinventing the wheel each time. This is how the Goodlegal idea crystallized – to create a platform that allows you to do this at scale.
Can Goodlegal take the place of a lawyer?
No. Goodlegal can help a nonlegal professional up to a point, while for lawyers it can be an answer to how to better and faster help their customers.
For example, the tenant feature allows a lawyer or a law firm to redefine the way they work with their customers. In each tenant, they can create a customer-only dedicated work environment. This means no more unsecured email work; they can proactively solve a lot of legal issues for a customer.
Tell me more about your target group and the different use cases – startups, scale-ups, enterprises?
Our initial focus is on startups. This is the issue that we would like to solve in terms of giving them the necessary legal tech, industry-standard content, and access to our law firms’ partner network, which specializes in the issues these companies are facing. No more spending time assessing various law firms to understand which one can help with a specific issue. Now you can go directly to someone vetted by us.
Any startup can put in place their legal infrastructure with several clicks by using predefined workspaces and the Day One Compliance document pack we prepared for them. This pack contains essential documents (e.g. terms of use, privacy policy, revenue and non-revenue generating templates, contractor and NDA templates), to be operationally live as soon as you created an account.
These industry-standard generic templates can be imported from the library directly into the personal workspace (private to the user) to finalize and publish in the Company workspace (accessible to all employees) – thus having one source of truth for everyone in terms of company-applicable policies or contract approved templates.
The benefits are compounded when we talk about a scaleup or an enterprise, where the volume of the documents needs a robust and agile technology infrastructure. This would allow for gathering relevant intelligence from the documents and ensure legal compliance.
The content side is not that important for scaleups and enterprises, as they already have a lot of content and experienced legal support, but the technical side is still relevant for them due to legal tech industry specificities, such as the existence of mostly niche products. These only solve one thing, such as e-sign, rather than a full suite of legal needs, such as Goodlegal (e.g. document management, document lifecycle, design, marketplace, law firms network, etc.). We are building an ecosystem, not only a feature.
What can you share with us about your plan for scaling the solution internationally?
We are global and could be used in any jurisdiction, except sanctioned ones, starting today. Even our Day One Compliance documents pack is generically drafted so that it can be used globally. Nevertheless, we also have geo-specific content published for Romania, for example, which we will expand to other countries also with the help of our partners.
You have been part of a tech company, and now you have embarked on your journey. How does your previous experience help now?
The UiPath experience made Goodlegal possible. I had the chance to put in place a global legal team ranging from Romania to Japan, India, and the US. And the legal and compliance infrastructure of a startup that became, in less than three years, a global company with all the challenges this involved.
This is one of a kind experience. In a regular company, this type of exposure would take at least one or two decades. This is the reason why I believe we are in the best position to offer a solution to achieve similar legal outcomes at scale.
