Why we invested in Bigle Legal: Next-generation document automation

Bigle Legal, a pioneer and leader in the field of legal document automation, announced last week that it closed a €2 million round of funding led by Adara Ventures with participation from ICF Venture Tech II . THCap and Cuatrecasas, existing investors in the company, also participated in the round. Headquartered in Barcelona, Spain, Bigle Legal plans to use the funds to fuel its international expansion. The company currently has an office in Lima, Peru and recently opened another in London.

We are delighted to be backing co-founders and brothers Alejandro Esteve de Miguel and Sergio Esteve de Miguel and the whole Bigle Legal team as they embark on the next step of their growth story.

The opportunity: Streamlining repetitive legal documents and processes

The legal industry has been amongst the slowest to adopt new technology. From concerns around security and efficacy to conservative and outdated practices, numerous factors are responsible for the industry’s slow adoption of digital tools. Additionally, many professionals in legal departments are resistant to embracing new tools, with the majority citing a lack of technical knowledge, skills, and understanding.

Legal professionals currently spend two-thirds of their time on repetitive and low value-added tasks and, according to a study by McKinsey and PWS, 20% of a lawyer’s time could be automated.

This has changed in the last few years, as larger and more complex workloads, flat budgets, and COVID-19 have favored legal tech adoption. Legal tech adoption has surged amongst corporate legal departments. While spending on legal tech is currently 4% of their total budget, this number is expected to triple over the next five years.

According to Gartner, “Legal departments will increase spending on tech to reduce the dependency on outside counsel, address COVID-19 and satisfy a long overdue need to modernize, digitize, and automate legal work.” The global legal services market is worth over $700 billion, and is expected to exceed $900 billion by 2025.

Bigle Legal: Boosting productivity with AI-powered, cloud-based document management

Bigle Legal provides an AI-powered, end-to-end cloud-based document management solution. The platform allows legal professionals to automatically create documents, send them for review and validation in real-time, virtually collaborate, negotiate, and collect electronic signatures. It also features certified email and cloud storage. 

Bigle Legal software decreases the time spent working on documents by 20 times, mitigates any risk of human error, and brings legal teams full control of their legal operations. It also streamlines the process of working on documents between the legal team and the rest of departments in an organisation, providing:

• End-to-end contract traceability – Helps teams clearly understand who created the document, who edited it, who signed it, and where it is stored.
  
• Contract control  - Automates document creation with approved templates, ensuring the compliance of any drafted contract with the company’s legal policies.
  
• Document automation - Empowers any department to create documents on their own, decreasing time spent by internal lawyers on trivial work.

The team behind Bigle Legal

Co-founders Alejandro and Sergio Esteve de Miguel believe strongly that technology is key to increasing productivity, boosting profitability, and establishing a better work-and-life balance in the legal sector. 

Alejandro previously worked as a lawyer for a Spanish law firm. He saw the need in the market for such a platform after experiencing the pain of managing contracts while acting as an interim legal department leader of a large automotive group. Sergio previously worked as an auditor and has a strong focus on financials and metrics. Together, they co-founded the Global Legal Tech hub in Barcelona.

Daniel Tomás Bartomeus (CTO) and Miriam Peñafiel Paez (COO) also bring deep industry experience to Bigle Legal, having built tech solutions and managed tech projects at large international companies such as BBVA, Fujitsu, and Everis.

Recently, Laura Urquizu, CEO of Redpoints and a serial entrepreneur, also joined the Bigle Legal board as an advisor. Laura is one of the most relevant CEOs in the European SaaS and legal tech communities, having taken the company from 10 full-time employees to 280 full-time employees and raising $87 million in the process.

The Adara view: Transforming the way companies create and manage legal documents

With a high number of use cases, we believe Bigle Legal’s document automation module is one of the most powerful and flexible solutions in the market today. Several leading companies, such as Cuatrecasas, Santa Lucía, Abanca, Galp, or Mahou already use Bigle Legal to automate their legal operations. What’s more, the company has shown a very promising product-market fit, tripling its MRR in 2020 and showing a net revenue retention above 100%. 

With the platform already translated into Spanish, Catalan, English, Portuguese and German, and a fast-growing international team, we believe Bigle Legal is well-positioned to take on new markets with success, and we’re delighted to join them in this next stage of growth. 

Learn more about Bigle Legal here.