Backed by some of Sweden’s most prominent investors including Cristina Stenbeck (former Executive Chairman at Kinnevik), PocketLaw has chosen the UK as its first international market to expand into, due to sector potential and the huge demand for affordable legal services. After doubling its customer base and tripling its annual recurring revenue between December 2020 and April 2021, the rapidly-growing SaaS business has now opened an office in London.

According to the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR), small businesses in the UK lose up to £13.6bn every year due to failures in taking care of their legal matters. For that reason, PocketLaw already helps thousands of small and mid-sized companies in Sweden, and included prominent tech scale-ups such as telehealth pioneer Livi, e-scooter company Voi, and London’s Kingly Court restaurant Le Bab on its British pilot.

How It Works

PocketLaw, an all-in-one digital legal solution available on browser, enables companies to create contracts and solve legal challenges instantly and at an affordable fixed price. Built by a complementary blend of lawyers, business strategists, and product engineers, the user-friendly interface allows anyone to solve their business’ legal challenges.

PocketLaw is the only solution that helps companies handle all contracts and legal matters in one place (covering everything from employment to corporate law and commercial agreements), while providing both a smart contract management system and direct access to lawyers on-demand.

All contracts and documents are stored within the digitally-secure PocketLaw infrastructure and the content provided by the company’s network of expert UK lawyers is constantly updated to reflect evolving British legislation.

PocketLaw equips all kinds of businesses, from fast-growing startups to multinational corporates, with an intuitive digital tool that can become their own in-house lawyer. The expert legal knowledge provided allows businesses to minimise risk, while the automation process saves teams significant amounts of time.

Olga Beck-Friis, PocketLaw COO and Co-founder, commented: “In an increasingly globalised world, the  complexity of legal hurdles for small and medium-sized businesses is  increasing. But with the right toolkit, anyone can solve their day-to-day challenges themselves and avoid spending time and money consulting with lawyers. That’s why we created PocketLaw, to empower businesses to use legal as a growth accelerator rather than an obstacle. The British sector is still very traditional, and existing legal software solutions tend to have lawyers, rather than their clients, in mind. We’ve come to the UK to change this.”

“We’ve recently started working with PocketLaw to improve the efficiency of our contract creation and internal processes. Our impressions have been very positive! The platform is really user friendly, even for non-lawyers, and we’ve received great support from the PocketLaw team.” Barry Ryan, Head of UK Legal at Voi UK.

Childhood Friends Disrupting An Archaic Industry

PocketLaw was founded by Kira Unger, CEO, and Olga Beck-Friis, COO, in 2018. The two women have been best friends since the ages of 7 and 10 respectively. PocketLaw now has 20 full-time employees and a C-suite made up of former senior employees from tech unicorns such as Spotify, Google, Zalando and Klarna, and top law firms such as Hogan Lovells, Mannheimer Swartling and Vinge. The size of the team has doubled in the last year.

The idea for PocketLaw came while Kira was working in Mergers and Acquisitions at leading Nordic business law firm Mannheimer Swartling. Kira noticed considerable barriers to legal services for smaller businesses, and that a simple and affordable tech-driven solution could provide a viable alternative. At the time, Olga was working as a management consultant at McKinsey, advising companies on how technology could improve processes and efficiency. Their complementary legal and strategic skill sets provided the perfect bedrock for PocketLaw.

The Thomson Reuters’ State of the UK Legal Market 2021 report revealed that 74% of senior UK partners believe there should be more investment made in legal tech. PocketLaw solves a number of significant problems in the industry. With lawyers often working to hourly rate pricing models, there is little incentive for innovation and efficiency. This in turn means that lawyers are happy to do manual work that could be automated by a solution like PocketLaw, and because efficiency is not a priority for the sector there aren’t many digital tools designed to save time.

Alongside this, the legal sector is often considered an inaccessible industry where knowledge is not readily shared. PocketLaw’s bank of content, templates, and information democratises business law expertise so that anyone can feel empowered to handle legal matters themselves.