When Alejandro Esteve de Miguel was working as a commercial lawyer, he realized he was spending too much time on routine tasks like generating standard contracts. He studied the market and found that some US companies offered tools for such mundane, repetitive work, but those did not exist in Spain.
Together with his brother, Sergio, a business and financial consultant, Esteve de Miguel conceived the idea of an automated platform for legal document management to increase productivity and boost the competitive advantage of legal firms and other large corporations. Quitting their respective jobs, the brothers founded Bigle Legal in Barcelona in October 2014. Following a year of tech development, the company started operating in January 2016.
Today, Bigle Legal is a cloud-based document automation SaaS platform that manages legal contracts in real time through every step of the process: creation, review, delivery and digital signature. A contract can be completed in just 10 minutes using any device, with the risk of human error reduced by 95%.
Headed by CEO Alejandro Esteve de Miguel and Chief Managing Director Sergio, the company has a team of 15 and an office in Peru. It has won two awards so far for legal contract management, including the Acelera Cuatrecasas prize in September 2016.
From B2C to B2B
Bigle Legal started as a B2C business, but gradually changed to a B2B model. The majority of Bigle Legal's clients are in Spain, with others in the Netherlands and Peru, and include large real estate companies, law firms, notaries and major corporations such as Coca-Cola and Telefonica, all with high volume of documentation. Esteve de Miguel's former employer, Spanish law firm Roca Junyent, is also a client.
Under its SaaS model, the platform charges about €35 per user per month, with a minimum of five users required. There are three plans to choose from: professional, premium and corporate. The first two have a free 30-day trial version.
The platform enables clients to convert any document into an into an intuitive online questionnaire, a process that Bigle Legal calls “document automation.” Answers to questions relating to name, ID or bank account number are automatically used by the platform to generate the final legal document, working 20 times faster than doing so manually. The client can download the final document or electronically send it for digital signature.
Bigle Legal also recently developed a new tool specifically for SMEs and freelancers. This platform offers a range of contracts and legal documents in five categories – rentals, corporate, labor, internet and private individuals – and can be customized for between €25 and €75. The company's immediate aim is to expand the range of legal documents in this tool.
No legal advice
Bigle Legal offers commercialization of automated legal document models for companies and individuals, but it does not provide legal advice. This business model gives the startup the freedom to market its services anywhere in the world, regardless of the legal system in a country. This is the company’s strong point and its “differentiator” when growing outside Spanish borders, a company spokesperson said, who added that if the company had to hire a legal expert in each country, its business model would be totally different.
The platform uses its own software developed with Ágora and can be integrated with any type of real-time platform. “The software not only gives clients a birds-eye view of the entire contract process but it also sends automatic notifications about the next steps and alerts on expiring contract dates,” the company spokesperson said.
For the company, the most important revenue stream is the monthly recurring fee, although this does not prevent the company from collecting an initial fee for document automation, but the company acknowledges that the one-off fee tends to be a barrier for SMEs' use of the Bigle Legal platform.
Most of its competitors are in the US. In Spain there are legaltech startups too, but they are few and offer only services related to contracts, whereas Bigle Legal covers all types of documents. According to the spokesperson, its local rivals are more oriented to smart contracts, which is a different kind of business, and, in any case, “as legal contract management is a new market, there are customers for everyone and the competition is not fierce.”
As at February 2019, the total amount invested in Bigle Legal business was €700,000. This included a seed round of €400,000 in July 2018, a recent €200,000 loan from ENISA, the Spanish state investment firm supporting startups and small and medium-sized enterprises, and cash injection by the founders.
In the near term, Bigle Legal wants to consolidate its position in the Spanish market to tap its vast pool of SMEs and freelancers. Next, the company intends to expand to more verticals, such as healthcare and hospitality, from the real estate and legal sectors it currently serves.
