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Are you into deep tech? Make sure you check out Thursday’s edition of PreSeed Now, when we’ll have a whole bunch of fresh deep tech teams to explore!*

But today, we’re in the world of legaltech SaaS. You can find out all about Shizl below.

Before we get to that…

• Ada Ventures has launched a pilot of its ‘AdaGPT' tool, which is designed to give founders instant feedback on their decks. It’s “an anonymous, free-to-access sounding board for any founder to use before they approach investors.”

• The University of Edinburgh based Venture Builder Incubator programme has launched for its new cohort. It will support 34 entrepreneurs from UK universities, including some interesting healthtech ideas listed in the announcement.

– Martin

PS: *Related point: come say hello if you’re going to be at the Conception X demo day in London today!

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Shizl wants to help small businesses stay on the right side of the law

When you launch a new small business, legal documentation is probably not one of the tasks you’re itching to prioritise.

Contracts, customer licensing agreements, policy documents and the like are easily put off. And it’s easy to forget about them until the very moment you really need them… or desperately wish you’d already done them.

Looking to help businesses deal with this problem is Shizl, a startup building a subscription business around access to the right documents at the right time, filled in and ready to use.

There are plenty of companies that will give you online access to legal documents, but they typically leave you to your own devices when it comes to figuring out exactly what you need, and when.

Shizl wants to make things as easy as possible, with AI to help guide you to the right documents, and help filling them in. It also wants to be the place you keep all those documents once they’ve been signed.

“It’s aimed at small businesses that either would find it prohibitive to afford a lawyer, or would be reluctant to spend that kind of money on a lawyer up front when they're not in trouble,” explains CEO Mark Edgeworth.

“We just want to make a more accessible version for the law that is affordable for small businesses and is as reliable, at least when you're getting your affairs in order, as using a lawyer would be. The alternatives, we think, are too risky.”

How it works

Shizl is a simple idea. You can use natural language queries to find the documents you need. Edgeworth gives the example of “I’m a skip hire company hiring my first employees and I’d like to make sure I’m compliant with employment law”.

Shizl will understand the query and find the documents it thinks you need. 

As you read through them, plain English translations of the legalese used in the documents help you make sure you understand what the document is about.

The software will also guide you through filing in the right details in the right places, and it integrates with Docusign so you can easily get them signed by the right people when needed. Shizl also acts as a library for your legal documents.

While you might still want to check your documents over with a lawyer, you’ll be spending a lot less on their fees than you would otherwise.

The product has subscription pricing, which at the time of writing ranges for £36 per month to £99 per month plus VAT across three tiers, with a scaling amount of credits to create documents, and the ability to store more documents in higher tiers.

The story so far

Shizl has its roots at a law firm in Leeds called Gunnercooke, where partner Rebecca Kelly and her colleagues wondered why something like this didn’t already exist.

If they want to avoid paying a lawyer, small businesses can either ask an AI tool like ChatGPT to knock something up, copy someone else’s legal documents, or go to an online document store and hope they pick the right thing. All these options have risks.

And so in early 2023 they brought in Edgeworth, with his background of senior roles at SaaS startups, to turn their ideas into a market-ready product, although to be clear, Gunnercooke is not involved with Shizl as a business.

“The core launch principle has been quality. We want to make sure that every contract that’s in Shizl and gets access by a client is the very best it can be, and as good as it would be if you went to a lawyer and got a bespoke contract made,” says Edgeworth.

Getting from the original idea at Gunnercooke to launch has taken around three years. Edgeworth says a lot of the time has been spent making sure the legal content is strong, and that the product is as accessible and welcoming to non-legal folk as possible.

This accessibility includes the AI-backed natural language search interface, simple, step-by-step process to completing a document, and the friendly, casual-looking branding.

Edgeworth says the brand is designed to look simple and appealing, even if there are “grey-suited lawyers behind the scenes.”

After a soft launch in April this year, the startup went live into the market last month.

For now, Shizl is focused on the legal landscape in England and Wales. Edgeworth says that once they’re sure they’ve got product-market fit, they’ll expand out to cover Scottish and Northern Irish law, before looking at international markets.