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, sending details about the implementation to custom success. There's just a lot of energy which is wasted on extracting, sending data, and no one really ever does it, has ever really done it properly. So that's also another key part of the problem that we're solving is making that data usable and shareable within the business.
So, isn't that the main problem that you're solving, the shareability of data, or are you also making contracts somehow easier to negotiate?
So, we're doing both. I'd say where my personal view is that the most value is on the data side of the business. But in terms of our actual contracts and the templates, we source them from the same libraries that law firms will source their templates from. But what we then do is we parameterize the agreements based on parameters which actually make sense. And then we simplify the options and the language so that the contracts are easy to understand, but very standard.
Because another thing, usually when you do engage a lawyer to work with you, they will always bias the agreement in your favor, which is great for you, but realistically is not where you end up post-negotiation. Whereas our approach is to start in the middle from the beginning, which means that there really shouldn't be any negotiation of the actual language. And on top of that, we simplify the language, which means that business users who read the contract actually understand what they're signing up for. So they're less dependent on their lawyers to explain why they should have this or why they shouldn't have this because the contracts are easier to understand.
I love it. So basically you say that there is more benefits to be gained by having a fast closure, a win-win closure with the counterpart than perhaps negotiating better terms than the counterpart would be able to do. So it's kind of an armistice agreement. They say, okay, we leave our lawyers at home, and we're going to do this on a handshake basis or basically on reasonable terms. So does it mean that a legislate contract will bear the pledge of approval of a reasonable business actor? So if people choose something from legislate that it's already negotiated the most reasonable contract for both parties and people can rely on signing this because it's a neutral contract?
Exactly. That's what we're trying to do. If someone wants to change the actual language of the contract, well, they can't actually do that within legislate. They can contact us and explain why maybe something needs to be changed, but we would add an option if it was not covered already in the contract, or we'd explain why what they're requesting is unreasonable or not possible. So I appreciate that right now, you know, it doesn't necessarily fit all businesses, but I'd say for 90% of businesses and 90% of the contracts that they create,this is a great solution to create contracts without faffing around.
I love it. Because ultimately, contracts are there to create certainty and protection to people. It’s not there to essentially pull a fast one on the other party, right, because that destroys trust in the long term. And there are companies that make their living on basically playing a power play because they are maybe in a position that they are bigger, they have more deeper pockets, they can pay for more expensive lawyers, they're going to create contracts which are one-sided and they want to get away, they want to have an advantage.
And I love that you kind of democratize this and say, okay, this solution is for people who don't want to abuse contracts, who just want to use that for the proper use, basically. I love that. So what are the opportunities? I mean, this could be a huge opportunity for a business to essentially scale the reasonable contract and build relationships on a fair basis with other parties.
So what do you recommend if I'm a business owner, I'm starting this business, or maybe I'm in an early stage and I'm getting out of this position where I'm working in the business, I start to work on the business, I start to build a leadership team and I realize that now we are becoming a real business. I want to kind of handle my contractual issues and kind of have a starting package of all the most important contracts that I need in the business. Do you offer that and what would that look like?
Absolutely. So I think the earlier you start with good contracts or a system like legislate, the more you'll save in time and money down the line, in our case legal, because, you know, even if you just have one employee, you want to have the right employment contract to protect your business. want them developing a competing product. And if you have just hired an employee on a handshake, you don't have that protection.
So even if you are very early stage, you should have, you know, start with your internal agreements, make sure that they're covered. And then, you know, as you grow, then you want to, you know, use, for example, confidentiality agreements to whenever you are discussing with partners, any potential partnerships or engagements or even clients. So I think it might seem like an additional piece of friction to create that contract. But if you are using a system like Legislate, the friction of creating the contract goes away.
Yeah, I love that. So other than employment agreements, what kind of other agreements lend themselves for being legislated, I guess?
So right now, we're still very early stage. So we're typically going after contracts that wouldn't necessarily require much negotiation. So where we have customers outside of employment, they will be working, for example, they've got maybe a terms of business agreement, which is specific to their business, but there are lots of parameters and data points that they need to track. We also work with recruitment, recruiters, you need their own terms of business agreements. We work in property with landlords and letting agents. So those are areas of focus. We also work with freelancers, consultants.
