https://youtu.be/RFneTbGCkkQ
Charles Brecque is the founder and CEO of Legislate, a tech company that makes it easy for non-lawyers to safely create, manage, and search lawyer-approved contracts on a no-legal budget. We talk about advanced contract management, how business deals fall apart because of contracts, and what to do when dealing with one-sided contracts.
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Legislate Your Business with Charles Brecque
Our guest is Charles Brecque, the founder and CEO of Legislate, a tech company that makes it easy for non-lawyers to safely create, manage, and search lawyer-approved contracts on a no legal budget. Wow, that sounds amazing. Welcome to the show, Charles.
Thank you, Steve, for having me.
It's great to have you here. And you, I know that you probably hate hearing this, but you're one of the youngest persons that ever came to the show, because I only invite CEOs and business owners. So congratulations for being top 30 under 30, I guess. And can you describe to us your entrepreneur journey, however short it has been, and how do you end up running a startup, you know, just after a handful of years out of college?
Well, yeah, it's an honor, Steve, to be, you know, one of your youngest guests. So I, yeah, I graduated from uni and straight away started, well, joined a startup. And at that time, I definitely didn't think I would be a founder straight away. I always had the ambition of maybe having my own company, but I definitely, when I started, I didn't, I wouldn't know where to start. And I started in business development. I was finding clients for the company, and I always found the biggest challenge not necessarily being finding clients, but actually getting contracts signed.
And in two occasions, we actually lost contracts post-negotiation because it had dragged on for so long that it was no longer a priority for the buyer, or the buyer lost their budget. And it was extremely frustrating. And I just felt that if I stayed at that company, even if it had only been three years, it would happen again. And I didn't want to waste any more energy or time finding clients if I can't actually close them because of contracts.
I just want to interject that I have had this experience as well, that contracts can really kill deals. And when I was an investment banker, we actually were really wary of lawyers who killed deals. And we made it took pains to partner with law firms who had a good business sense, who wanted to close the deal, who didn't just want to demonstrate a million ways of how they can pull a contract apart, but actually were constructive. And we also had to make sure that we picked attorneys who matched the other party, because if there was a big, big mismatch then that could cause issues as well. take this deal as far as possible without being the attorneys, involving the attorneys, because there was always this risk element of dragging things out. So sorry, I didn't want to interrupt you. So carry on.
Yeah, so no, that's exactly, you know, what was happening with us. And if you think about a contract, a contract creates friction by design, because you need lawyers or people with legal expertise to safely negotiate it, make the amendments and, you know, sign it off. But if you're not a lawyer, which is the case for most business users, then you're really dependent on lawyers. So that doesn't really scale very well. And in my case, it was why we were losing the contracts. So maybe naively, I thought that I could solve this problem. And for, you know, I need to start a company to make contracts machine readable so that we don't need to get lawyers involved at every single step.
And me, the business user, I can, in a safe way, create contracts, get them signed, and then post-signature access the data in the contracts because that in itself is, I'd say, where a lot of energy post-contract signature is wasted, is in extracting payment terms, matching them to, sending them to finance,