LawCanvas wants to be the legal eagle for Singaporean startups
LawCanvas is one of a new wave of startups providing services for startups. As the name implies, it focuses on legal help – specifically, coming up with legal documents.
“We’re seeking to complement the legal industry and its professionals, not seeking to supplant it,” explains co-founder Daniel Leong. LawCanvas is purely for tech startups or small businesses that need to draft a legally-binding document. “We don’t give advice as we’re a software service, not a law firm. One-to-one legal advice is always best left to professionals.”
The idea is that, by using the online tool for creating documents, it saves entrepreneurs time drafting files when they’re incorporating the company, hiring new staff, or securing a non-disclosure agreement, and avoids issues like drawing up a contract that’s full of holes. For now it’s focused on Singapore law, but the startup is already working on launching in neighboring Malaysia. Leong explains that the service is more scalable to new countries than it sounds:
A popular misconception about our business is that we’re constrained to a certain fixed number of countries due to the type of legal system that they’ve chosen e.g. civil law vs case law. It actually doesn’t matter to us what legal system a particular country has adopted because all the documents that are used within that legal system are simply pieces of content e.g. MS Word files that can be hosted on our software. The “content” for each country may change, but the software in itself remains the same – and is hence very scalable.
While this is relatively uncharted territory in Asia, the trail has long since been blazed in the US by online services like LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer. LegalZoom, founded way back in 1999, is now fairly well known in America, while the latter has gained significant traction in the six years that it’s been around and has raised over US$40 million in funding. But neither have been without controversy – and LawCanvas might prove to be controversial in Asia as well.
LawCanvas, pitching today at our Startup Arena contest in Jakarta, Indonesia, says that it’s aiming to raise US$300,000 soon in order to expand its legal documents database across the region.
The panel of four judges asked a number of questions that showed they’re worried about the stickiness of the service – if the startup is copyable, or the legal documents themselves could be replicated. Leong (pictured above) counters by saying the service is strong enough and useful enough for it to stand as a business in Asia.
This is part of the coverage of Startup Asia Jakarta 2014, our event running on November 26 and 27. Check out all the Startup Arena pitches here.
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