Marcus Richards
Legislate is making it easy for businesses to create lawyer-approved contracts and track the data they contain at scale, using patented knowledge graph technology. Legislate is aimed primarily at non-lawyers and aims to streamline end-to-end workflows which involve contracts.
Tell us about yourself?
I have a background in Engineering and spent 3 years bringing Machine Learning solutions to market at Mind Foundry, a spin-out from the University of Oxford. I was frustrated by how long it would take simple, low value contracts to be processed which is why I started Legislate.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
To be more patient and to not be afraid of vision and ambition.
What problem does your business solve?
Contracts create friction because they are complicated, require legal expertise, and are often in an unstructured format (word/pdf). Legislate is making contracts machine readable so that they can be created digitally by non-lawyers and queried at scale.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
Although I’m not a lawyer, I spent half my time processing contracts when I was doing business development at a startup.
Creating, negotiating and tracking contracts was unnecessarily slow and painful because the contracts were not machine readable. Instead, the contracts were lawyer-readable which meant that time poor lawyers were needed to review them.
After losing deals due to slow processing I wanted to find a way to make contracts machine readable so that they could be processed more efficiently with technology.
What is your magic sauce?
Competitors optimise lawyers or the tools they work with (word/unstructured data templates). Legislate can be used by non-lawyers and offers an end-to-end contracting experience using patented knowledge graph technology which makes contract data usable.
With Legislate, businesses can quickly answer questions like “How many of my employees which have a tenure of 3 years are on a 30 day notice period?”
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Legislate’s plan is to open up contract data so that workflows can be automated beyond the contract. This means setting up pensions, payroll automatically after an employment contract has been signed etc.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
Our biggest challenge like most startups is finding customers. Luckily we have a strong inbound marketing strategy but we need to be better at outbound. Ultimately, whilst most businesses recognise the importance of legal, they are not usually proactive about it.
How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We want small business owners to use us to streamline their contracts regardless of whether they have a legal team because they value efficient processes and the power of contract data. The best way to reach out is via our website https://www.legislate.tech
