Late last year, Allens identified a need to build on their legal tech work by joining forces with startups in the legal tech space. Auctus - Allens Legal Accelerator was launched to offer innovators and entrepreneurs from Australia and around the world the opportunity to develop their ideas and solve real business challenges with the backing of Allens' expertise and support. Allens identified two problem statements and enlisted the support of Collective Campus to scout high-quality startups.

Challenge #1 - Contract creation and management

Legal contracts are static, highly manual to create and manage, and difficult to analyse at scale. This creates difficulties for law firms and clients alike in both managing existing contracts effectively and making sure their legal agreements are the best they can be, for all parties and stakeholders. We’re interested in solutions that can help us enhance contract management, reduce manual work and decrease time spent creating contracts. 

Challenge #2 - Risk assessment, management and compliance

There is increasing demand among businesses for detailed advice on risk exposure and compliance response. However, there are significant technical and operational barriers to identifying, assessing and prioritising risks, and setting and simplifying compliance controls, as part of a risk management framework. Similarly, businesses find it difficult to both operationalise and culturally embed these practices and mindsets. We’re interested in solutions that can help us support our clients in understanding their risk and compliance issues and embedding processes for ongoing management. 

The program received more than 120 applications from legaltech and regtech startups around the world for the eight-week virtual program. The final seven were chosen from a shortlist of 15 who pitched their offering to a panel of expert judges from Allens and Collective Campus.

The following seven startups developing solutions in document automation, smart contracts and AI-driven knowledge management have been announced as the first participants in Auctus – Allens Legal Accelerator.

• Avvoka: a next-generation document automation, negotiation and analytics tool for in-house legal, law firms and business teams;
• BuildSort: a smart legal contract platform initially targeting the construction sector;
• Hutly: a smart contract platform that is simplifying contract management with a way for general tenancy agreements to be completed, issued, tracked, and digitally signed in minutes;
• Inpact: an AI-powered enterprise software platform that turns contracts into structured, easily-analysable data to uncover new business insights;
• Summize: a lightweight assistant to the contract lifecycle which creates instant, easy-to-read summaries of uploaded contracts;
• Syntheia: an end-to-end knowledge solution that helps to collect, manage, share and apply knowledge from documents and experts; and              
• Wage Buddy: a legal technology platform that simplifies Australian Fair Work Awards by analysing, interpreting and codifying Awards to facilitate automated reasoning.  

The startups - which are headquartered in four different countries - will now work with mentors and experts from Allens on their legal, growth and innovation strategies as well as attending masterclasses, testing and receiving feedback on their products from the firm, and participating in facilitated strategic introductions to Allens' extensive networks.