At one of his previous employers, Sashwat Raghuwanshi said they wasted piles of capital due to a lack of the appropriate in-house technology to handle internal legal operations.
His role was to work with in-house legal counsel to determine what problems they were facing, examine efficiency issues, and eliminate pain points. Eventually seeing these issues were commonplace at many large organizations, Raghuwanshi founded SEPT.
“In-house legal lawyers there, they spent most of their job doing admin work and just manual labour,” he said.
“If you walk into these kinds of like floors, where these lawyers work at in these companies, it’s like very ancient, but you get a prehistoric vibe from it.”
Raghuwanshi said boardrooms were filled with documents, quite often with people manually handling the information.
“Where we come in, is we help these lawyers automate a lot of the document movement. We’re a project management system,” he said.
When a lawyer opens up a “matter” the SEPT system allows them to upload the legal documents into the system. Based off of previous data – whether it’s a land agreement, non-disclosure agreement or other contract – the system using predictive tools to fill in the agreements and lay out what the likely next steps would be.
“Our system recognizes that, and we can kind of already do those steps beforehand, so you don’t even have to go in and touch it,” he said.
“All you have to do is kind of just double check and then move on with the work.”
Their system also comes with a stakeholder portal, so their business partners or associates can also keep track of where the workflow is at.
The system runs on algorithms that process the data that’s entered and each clients has its own database, Raghuwanshi said.
Understanding the startup ecosystem
Raghuwanshi said he’s young and thus far, his experience has been through internships at larger corporations and with some startups. He joined the Alberta Catalyzer – Velocity program because he needed more guidance on how the innovation and startup ecosystem functioned.
“What steps do people who are already so ahead of me take to get there?” Raghuwanshi said.
“It’s kind of like a journey and it’s really dark, so I kind of needed some light.”
He said he’s learned something from every Velocity session because it’s something new that he hasn’t experienced.
Raghuwanshi said he believes that companies will eventually see there’s tremendous value in automating much of this admin work. The current systems out there aren’t evolving with changing workflows.
“I’ve realized a lot of these backroom functions like tax, real estate or HR, finance have the same kind of issues that in-house counsels are going through because they’re cost centers, so they don’t generate the company profit,” he said.
To that end, the goal is to continually build a broader client base, learning more about the different facets of each area of an organization, so they can tailor the system to meet the needs of these companies.
Raghuwanshi said it’s about making the people in an organization – the professionals – more effective at their respective jobs. Right now, the in-house lawyers often do the labour and companies hire external counsel to provide added service.
“I don’t think we’re going to need fewer lawyers at organizations,” he said.
“I think the lawyers that they already have will be more effective in providing that legal value.”
- Join Alberta Catalyzer to fast-track your startup with know-how and expert guidance. Alberta Catalyzer offers merit-based, pre-accelerator programs for early-stage tech entrepreneurs in Alberta at no cost. These programs are developed and delivered by Platform Calgary and Edmonton Unlimited, with support from partners and organizations across the Alberta Innovation Network. They are made possible by the generous support of the Alberta Scaleup and Growth Accelerator Program, run by a consortium led by Alberta Innovates. The consortium includes the Government of Alberta, Prairies Economic Development Canada (PrairiesCan), The City of Edmonton through Edmonton Unlimited, and the City of Calgary’s Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund allocated $35 million over three years to retain business accelerators. It’s part of the Alberta government’s goal to help create 20,000 jobs and increase technology firm revenue to $5 billion by 2030.
