Associate editor Caroline Hill reports… Digital legal agreement tracking company PactSafe has secured $600,000 of funding to launch this week, becoming the first cloud-based service that manages, tracks, updates and deploys digital legal agreements for its clients. The Indianapolis-founded company is being backed by investment firms including Elevate Ventures and Vulpes Testudo Fund to launch the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.
Online legal agreements such as a company’s terms of service or privacy policy can be stored on PactSafe’s dashboard, which ensures that digital agreements are trackable by the correct version so they can be referred to and upheld in a court of law.
PactSafe was founded by corporate lawyer and entrepreneur Brian Powers, who said: “Historically, lawyers often created online agreements for clients with no provision for ongoing management or enforcement assurance of the documents over time. This scenario exposed corporate clients to risk for litigation and the lawyers themselves were at risk for malpractice. We developed PactSafe to be a resource for corporate clients and their legal counsel to ensure that digital legal agreements were effectively managed and enforceable.”
The PactSafe application manages and enforces both “browsewrap” and “clickwrap” agreements: the former being agreements that users accept simply by accessing a website where an agreement notice is clearly visible, and the latter that requires the user to actively click “ok” or “agree”.
Powers is joined by chief operating officer Eric Prugh, who before joining PactSafe spent seven years at ExactTarget, which was acquired in 2013 by SalesForce Marketing Cloud. The startup is backed by a weighty advisory board that includes Vanessa Butnick Davis, vice president of research and product development at LegalZoom.com and Todd Richardson, executive vice president for SalesForce Marketing Cloud.
The SaaS model is priced on a per-user basis ranging from $10 to $75 per account, per month for sites with less than 10,000 registered users. https://www.pactsafe.com/