PocketLaw’s Pivot To AI-Driven Contract Management

Deciding to pivot is a big decision for any business, but PocketLaw chose to do it. Artificial Lawyer spoke to Kira Unger Söderlind, CEO and co-founder, to hear about the move.

The company, which has bases in Sweden and the UK, started out as something of a LegalZoom, with a focus on templates and sourcing legal help for SMBs – now it’s all about genAI and contract management for larger companies.

‘We have gone through a big pivot,’ states Söderlind, then adds that to understand the change in strategy you have to go back to the beginning. So, that’s what we do.

‘I’m a lawyer and I wanted to be one since I was 10. My uncle was one and I really wanted to join the firm [ Mannheimer Swartling] where he worked and do M&A deals,’ she explains.

And that is exactly what happened. However, she quickly found that legal life had some unexpected challenges.

‘The software we used, it was not user-friendly,’ she explains, ‘and so in 2018 my co-founder [Olga Beck-Friis] and I started to share ideas with a plan to fill a gap in the market for a legal tech platform for corporates.’

‘We also had a grant from the Swedish Government in 2018 in relation to AI tools, but we saw that they struggled with accuracy. We assumed that eventually better models would be made, and that is what has happened,’ she adds.

Regardless of where AI was at the time, in 2020 they launched with a focus on startups and scaleups, building a platform that allowed clients to sign and store contracts – as well as offering to connect smaller companies to legal help when needed.

But, sales cycles were long and although they’d gained traction with SMBs they decided on two things: 1) to move upmarket to mid-size and large companies, and 2) to embrace the legal AI opportunity provided by the arrival of LLMs.

‘There was a shift with AI, and it’s been a total transformation. It’s been a huge journey for us,’ she notes.

Below are just some of the recent product developments at PocketLaw, which as you can see have taken the company on by leaps and bounds from where it first started:

‘1.     AI agents for contract reviews and other legal tasks, including:

– Citation-backed generative support

– Playbook-driven contract review and auto-redlining

– Bulk review of large set of data/files

– Search and more….

2.      AI Legal Agent as Word Add-in

3.      Advanced, AI-powered Dashboarding and Reporting Capabilities

– Building dashboards in natural language

4.      Less exciting, but enterprise required features:

– Advanced approval and eSigning workflows

– Granular access and permission levels

– SOC2 Certified.’

Overall, Söderlind sees this pivot as not just about the business, but being part of a change across the legal sector that is much broader.

It’s such a privilege to be a legal tech company in the era of AI. It can solve problems that were just not solvable before. This future is what fuels our motivation. It’s an unprecedented time for the legal profession,’ she notes.

‘I believe 2025 will be the year of action, the fog is clearing [on genAI],’ she adds, then adds: ‘Legal tech is still in its infancy. I think we will see exponential gains over time.’

And this site would 100% agree with that last comment. The first computerised systems used for a specific legal purpose may have come to into this world back in the 1950s, and we have seen wave after wave of new legal tech arrive since then, but the core processes and workflows on which lawyers spend most of their time are only just starting to be transformed. Yet, this change process will accelerate.

So, what next?

Now that the pivot has been made, the focus is on growth. Söderlind says that they’re super-focused on customer retention and the increase of the platform’s usage, and they’ve seen monthly improvements there. They’ve also seen that once an inhouse team brings on their platform it’s used by plenty of other people in the business. In short, there’s a network effect.

‘The hurdle is how to get into a new routine [for the buyers], once that is done they keep coming back,’ she concludes. And that suggests the pivot has been successful.

All-in-all, it goes to show that legal tech companies, as well as lawyers and how they work, can keep evolving. Plus, because the underlying tech foundations keep changing, e.g. with the arrival of genAI, everything else in the sector must adapt too.