We speak to founder, Julia Salasky, about the platform, clients, and roadmap
London-headquartered B2B SaaS platform Legl, which digitises law firm onboarding and KYC processes, today (12 March) announces a $7M Series A led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investors Backed, Samaipata and First Round Capital, and high profile angels including Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas (ex CPO and COO GoCardless), Al Giles (ex CRO of legal business Axiom) and Hayden Brown (CEO of Upwork).
Legl was launched in October 2019 by CrowdJustice founder Julia Salasky. Hosted in AWS and now used by 12 of the UK top 200 law firms, it streamlines onboarding, compliance and payment tools, as well as providing analytics into client behaviour.
Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Salasky said that through her work with CrowdJustice, it became apparent that there were significant opportunities to help law firms digitise the way they run their business. She said: “A lot of legal tech focuses on how to make legal services better but we saw an opportunity to make the delivery better including digitising the admin around onboarding, collecting payments, and understanding your client.”
The no-code platform helps to avoid multiple emails and creates an audit trail and system of record. It also introduces a replicable digital workflow that can be made client, practice, or risk specific.
Salasky told us: “Firm can onboard clients faster but also look at the analytics to work out what time of day they are paying and make better business decision to speed transactions up.”
Legl has been working with clients on integrations with their case management systems and Salasky added: “Some firms have 20 different onboarding workflows and some have two.”
The company launched six months before COVID but Salasky says: “What’s interesting is that it felt to me that change was already happening then and people wanted to innovate but didn’t know how to.”
Legl typically deals with heads of IT and heads of compliance and has around 100 clients in total.
Salasky plans to use the funds to build a team and build the product and says: “What’s really cool is that we have a vision of where we want to go and customers are validating that vision with the things they want us to add.”
Digital onboarding has become a necessity thanks to remote working and those reaping the benefit include digital onboarding startup Thirdfort. Others active in the space include InfoTrack and Minerva Portal in the real estate sector and Intapp within the large law sector.
In a release out today, Claire Dunn, a partner at Woodfines LLP, said: “Legl is saving at least 1 hour per transaction, and it’s reducing the overall time to complete a conveyancing transaction by 1-2 weeks.”
Zoe Chambers, early stage investor at Octopus Ventures, said: “It’s rare to find a founder and team with such insider knowledge to tackle a big industry that has started to adopt technology quickly. Covid has accelerated the move to digital in the legal industry, and Julia and team, with deep expertise across legal, SaaS and fintech, are in prime position to win the market.”