A Chat with Charles Brecque, CEO & Founder at Legal Tech Company: Legislate

Legislate is a legal technology company which makes contract data usable within contract and business workflows. Legislate’s contract creation and management software platform is easy-enough for non-lawyers to create robust contracts and gives them the tools they need to track key contract data and answer important questions about their contracts.

 

 

​​What’s the story behind the founding of the company?

 

Although I’m not a lawyer, I spent half my time processing contracts when I was doing business development at a startup. Contracting 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 opportunities due to the slow processing of contracts, I wanted to find a way to make contracts machine readable so that they could be processed more efficiently with technology.

 

What do you think makes this company unique?

 

Legislate is unique because it is making contracts machine readable for businesses instead of optimising contracting workflows which work for lawyers and lawyer-readable documents. Legislate makes contracts machine readable using knowledge graphs so that lawyer-approved contracts can be easily created and searched post-signature. Legislate’s knowledge graph validates the contractual terms imputed by users and makes them hyper-searchable. For example, employers can use Legislate to answer questions like how many employees which have been with the company for 3 years, with this job title and this salary are on a 30 day notice period? And how many other employees are in a similar situation? How many of these employees report to Jane smith?

 

 

What can we hope to see from Legislate in the future?

 

Legislate is making its contract creation and management functionality available via its Public API so that software platforms can offer deeper contracting experiences to their users. This means that users of those platforms will no longer need to transfer data from those systems to Legislate when they need to create contracts. This also means that Legislate can remove friction post-contract signature by offering directly within Legislate, services and tasks which are related to the contract. For example, employers will be able to set up pensions and payroll for a new employee straight from the employment contract. Legislate’s future growth will therefore come from making contract data usable within contract and business workflows and by growing its contract library so that more businesses in more verticals can create lawyer-approved contracts on no legal budget.