Managing snowballing in-house legal workflows and processes has become tougher than ever for businesses around the globe, leading to burnout, lost data, business risk and uneven customer service. But Kiwi software innovator LawVu is rising to the challenge, dramatically simplifying the process of overseeing contracts, getting expert advice and reporting with smart Azure-based technology. It’s a perfect example of a homegrown SaaS company with great ideas transforming the world.
Anyone operating a business today will acknowledge the challenge of staying on top of increasing regulation and change. There’s the growing need to protect privacy and data, evolving contract issues relating to supply chain and employee management in the post-COVID environment, and new reporting requirements around sustainable finance. It’s all part of a global trend that is increasing in-house legal teams’ workloads at an alarming rate.
In the US, research house Gartner reports more than half of corporate lawyers are exhausted. A 2021 survey by EY predicts workloads for General Counsels will grow 25% over the next three years. 
Additionally, many feel unempowered by their tools – 77% of in-house legal teams spend over one hour per day jumping between systems to gain a complete view of their work, according to the 2022 In-house Legal Technology Report. Meanwhile, 92% of all respondents believe that time spent on manual daily activities takes time and effort away from working on larger business goals or affects their ability to deliver services in a timely manner.
The team at LawVu are on a mission to help, developing their own legal workspace to support in-house lawyers across the globe.
LawVu is a true Kiwi success story. Fledged in Tauranga, its customer base spans companies from New Zealand to the UK, US and Australia, across sectors as diverse as automotive, accounting and professional services, local government and primary industries.
“Founding the company was driven by my own personal experiences of dealing with lawyers, when I was selling out of a business and realised that a lot of internal processes were more painful than they should be. About that time, I was introduced to my co-founder, Tim Boyne, who’d had a lot of experience with legal teams, and we had a meeting of minds. One thing led to another and we started looking at the market and how we could improve access to legal and make things more straightforward,” says Sam Kidd, CEO and co-founder at LawVu.
Not many businesses have a single platform where all requests for the legal team’s advice are logged in one place. Whether it’s email requests or hallway conversations, corporate lawyers regularly get so many enquiries from different sources it can be hard to keep track. The originators of the requests often need to follow up to check on their status, which means time-consuming back and forth, taking away the team’s focus from valuable work. Needless to say, some requests get missed along the way.
And some matters are more pressing than others, but without a way of triaging them to deal with the most important ones first, companies can require almost supernatural levels of co-ordination to ensure they are all responded to and resolved in a timely manner. Especially when members of the legal team are off sick or on leave.
Sam and Tim noticed most lawyers were using Word or email for everything – even the most advanced were using Excel. It was the same overseas.
“Wherever they’re based, corporate lawyers we speak to consistently say they go in-house because they want to make a real impact on the businesses they work with and help them grow. But so many companies don’t have that kind of visibility,” Sam says.
With its flagship Azure platform, also called LawVu, the company helps customers simplify the fiendishly complex task of managing corporate legal affairs. It’s in the name – law view. By providing a tool that enables all members of the legal team to monitor the progress of requests for support, along with the person who submitted the request, it takes so much of the manual follow-up and admin out of corporate lawyers’ busy schedules.
Building trust from scratch
Chief Operating Officer, Sarah Webb, says convincing naturally risk-averse legal professionals to entrust sensitive data to the cloud wasn’t always a straightforward task – but Microsoft’s reputation for security was key.
“Choosing a platform like Microsoft Azure really helped us in those early days,” she says. “A lot of our customers have strict data sovereignty requirements, and just being able to bring up a full stack in their region, isolated, meeting all of the security requirements that they have, has been incredibly powerful and enabling for us.”
And LawVu’s own practices are geared to making the whole migrate and build process easy and thorough. Its team works with clients to develop a customised implementation plan to fit the company’s exact needs.
“Our product can be used straight out of the box, and we constantly receive feedback on how easy and fast it is to implement. Our customer success team is trained to develop customised plans and identify people within a business who can champion the product and help train others. We also have our own change management experts,” says Sarah.
That close relationship with customers has made it easy for LawVu to identify opportunities to create bolt-on solutions such as an RFP (request for proposal) module, so the status of RFPs is easily visible as part of the end-to-end solution. There’s also a Contracts module to provide complete visibility of contracts coming across lawyers’ desks and it enables them to develop their own reports using Azure’s data-capture tools, and Engage, dedicated to managing relationships with external legal specialists.
Tackling the skills challenge head on
As LawVu continues to grow, it’s encountering a new set of challenges and opportunities.
Matt Bostwick, Partner Director for Microsoft New Zealand has highlighted the skills gap that continues to challenge partners across the network, making it even more urgent to address inequality and reach into more communities.
“It’s pretty obvious there’s a diversity issue in tech. Only 27 per cent of workers in tech are women, four per cent are Māori and less than three per cent are Pasifika,” he says.
LawVu is already taking steps to counter that in its own business.
“The key thing is attracting a diverse pool of talent into all of our open roles. We see it as our responsibility to start much further up the pipeline, so we need to get into schools and universities and educate people on the kinds of careers that will be available to them if they choose a technology path early on,” Sarah says.
LawVu has many team members who attend careers events and visit schools to spread the word about opportunities in the sector, also taking on new interns across the business for the first time in 2021. They’re keen to spread the word that people from all backgrounds are welcome.
Sam believes you don’t have to have an expensive education to succeed in a tech career, as learning is available online and in so many other settings.
“In our early days, one of our developers had actually dropped out of school, because he’d started coding from the time he was 10. By the time he reached 18, he’d had eight years of experience. We’d take him all day, every day, someone who has that passion for learning. You don’t have to come out of college, you just have to show that interest to learn.”
Taking on the legal world
The same “anyone can do it with the right tools” philosophy could apply just as well to LawVu’s success in international markets, proving that a small business from the Bay of Plenty can hold its own against big players in the US – especially when they’re all using the same technology, like Dynamics 365 and Azure.
LawVu has big ambitions to scale up growth in the attractive US and UK markets and continues to work with Microsoft to co-develop and market its products. It’s already winning major attention at home, netting the Emerging SaaS Award at the 2021 Microsoft New Zealand Partner Awards.
“LawVu is an outstanding example of an innovative, ambitious Kiwi SaaS business, punching well above its weight as its unique tools grow a legion of fans here and overseas. They’re already helping customers around the world manage complex and evolving legal issues, supporting in-house legal teams to work more effectively across their organisations, boost productivity and demonstrate their value,” says Matt Bostwick.
Sam credits being a Microsoft partner, with support from the Microsoft for Start-Ups programme that provided access to free tools and licences, as a major spur to the business’s success.
“A lot of corporations are on the Microsoft suite, so getting things like the single sign-on and also the integrations into Outlook and Word, have been huge for us from day one. Because we’re not trying to take people away from those – what we’re trying to do is augment them with a bit of LawVu love.
“If you’re going from nothing to a whole new system, you can under-utilise those tools, so with those familiar product integrations it was a nice, slow step for people into a more full, robust LawVu platform. Today, things like Outlook plug-ins and Teams integrations are a massive seller for us,” Sam says.
And the future looks equally massive.