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I’m very excited to announce a massive upgrade coming soon to Sprintlaw’s Member platform. After being over a year in the making, I wanted to share our journey, the thinking behind this upgrade, and what you can expect from our new platform.
Our Journey To Here
Sprintlaw was founded with a mission to make legal services simple and accessible for small businesses and startups everywhere. We knew that legal services have always been a headache for small businesses – too slow, too confusing, and too expensive – and our vision has always been to eliminate these pain points and build the fastest, simplest and most affordable legal experience.
Fixed-Fee Services
When we started Sprintlaw in 2017, we focussed on creating a catalogue of fixed-fee, technology-enabled legal services. This approach was designed to eliminate the opaque ‘hourly billing’ practices of traditional law firms, which were the underlying cause of many of the issues with the industry. Under hourly billing, “the longer you take, the more you make” – meaning there has never been a strong incentive for traditional firms to boost efficiency or adopt technology.
We knew that by ‘productising’ our services at fixed rates – then investing in technology, capturing and structuring legal data, and building efficient workflows – we would get smarter, faster and more efficient over time. This ultimately enabled us to provide higher quality services than traditional firms at a fraction of the cost.
As a result, our fixed-fee services became an instant hit with Australian small businesses when we launched – and we experienced rapid growth over our first few years as we expanded our fixed-fee services to cover hundreds of different small business legal services across industries.
An Incomplete Solution
As we got to know our small business clients, we soon realised that our fixed-fee services were not a complete solution for our clients pain points. Our fixed-fee services were reactive in nature, and designed to deliver fast solutions to one-off problems which our clients already knew about and were seeking us out for.
These one-off, transactional services, restricted us from building a deeper relationship with our client base – a relationship we wanted to invest more into to help identify and proactively resolve legal challenges which they may not even be aware of.
We also saw that this model made it difficult for clients to engage with us for smaller questions or unstructured discussion – we were requiring them to buy a fixed fee consult every time they had even a quick question.
After hearing consistent feedback from customers, we realised we needed to create a new product to resolve this.
Enter the Membership
In 2020, we decided to create the Sprintlaw Membership subscription. The Membership was competitively priced at $799 per year – where members could receive unlimited quick, 30 minute calls with our lawyers, and discounts on any returning services.
The idea behind the Membership was that by evaporating the cost barrier between clients speaking to lawyers, we could encourage more engagement and help clients better understand their legal risks – ultimately taking proactive steps to reduce these risks.
To house the Membership and validate it’s need with our clients, we quickly built a basic software platform – basically just a call booking engine.
The response to the Membership was overwhelmingly positive. Within a year, the percentage of our clients opting for the membership model surged from 30% to 80-90% – and our Member base has since grown to over 3,000 small business and startups members in Australia, New Zealand and the UK as at 2024.
Learning More Lessons
As our member base and our legal data grew, we began to learn a lot more about the ongoing legal needs of our small business clients and about the many mistakes that were being made.
Firstly, we saw that small businesses ‘didn’t know what they didn’t know’. For example, lots of clients who we’d only helped with contract documentation were exposed to serious risks in other areas that they weren’t aware of including privacy, brand protection, shareholder relations and employment law.
In addition, many clients weren’t informed of recent changes in laws – and were maintaining and utilising documents that were extremely outdated (some of which breached the law).
Other clients were downloading templates and writing their legal documents themselves to save money. While this might be okay for basic documents, it can be extremely risky for critical documents like shareholders’ agreements or client contracts – and we found many clients used DIY documents that were non-compliant with Australian laws, or left them worse off than if they had no document at all.
Our existing Member platform, though successful, was built quickly and served as a very basic solution. It was clear that we needed to build a more sophisticated solution to effectively and proactively address these ongoing needs.
We began to plan out the ‘dream features’ of new software and workflows for Sprintlaw which we felt would help address small businesses’ legal needs more holistically. The advent of LLMs, particularly ChatGPT in late 2022, presented an incredible opportunity for us to accelerate this.
The Birth of the New Platform
In early 2023, we began work on a major transformation project for Sprintlaw – which we’ve referred to internally as “Sprintlaw 2.0”. For us, this wasn’t about adding new bells and whistles to our Membership or software platform; it was about reimagining our entire approach using on our increasingly deep understand of our clients and their problems, and the need for proactive legal help.
We conducted extensive research and spoke to many of our small business clients to better understand their needs and whether our feature ideas resonated. By mid 2023, we had quietly raised a new funding round and began work on planning, building, testing and re-building a new version of Member platform to be at the core of our new proactive approach.
Fast forward to today after a year of very hard work, the launch of the new platform is finally imminent… and we couldn’t be more excited to go live!
Here’s a sneak peek at what’s to come:
Feature: Legal Health Monitor
We’ll monitor your business’ legal health based on your business’ legal data, and inform you of critical issues, as well as lower-order legal issues you need to address via a personalised dashboard.
Feature: Free Documents
You can instantly generate 50+ simple legal documents yourself, including web terms, term sheets, and staff policies and procedures. These are lawyer vetted templates and we’ve only included documents in the library which we are comfortable are low risk to create yourself.
Feature: Fixed-Fee Service Credits
You can request, track, and securely receive fixed-fee legal services from our expert lawyers via the portal, with super fast turnaround times for your important documents and other legal advice. We’ll also give you $250 credits per quarter for you to spend on our lawyers, as well as unlimited free 30-minute consults for quick questions.
Feature: Document Monitoring
We continuously monitor legal documents that we’ve drafted or reviewed for you and will email you know if a document needs to be re-checked, if an important date is coming up, or if it may be affected by recent changes in laws.
Feature: Sprintlaw AI
You can speak to Sprintlaw’s “Taylor AI” over the phone or via chat for instant answers to simple legal questions. Taylor is powered by OpenAI’s GPT model and augmented by our database of over 10,000 small business law resources from Australia, the UK, and NZ to provide highly accurate, relevant advice.
You can also upload your own legal documents and chat to them to get initial advice on key issues. This feature can also be used on documents our lawyers have drafted for you, or any Free Documents you have generated in the platform.
Feature: eSignatures
You can cancel your other eSignature subscriptions! We’ve integrated a fully-fledged eSignatures tool into our platform – where you can send, manage, and review documents at no additional cost. We allow up to 25 documents to be sent for signature per month as part of the plan.
Feature: Webinars
We run regular Member webinars on all kinds of legal topics, from foundational education in areas like privacy, employment, IP and capital raising, to updates on changes in laws that affects small businesses and startups. We also house a library recordings of all sessions for those who can’t make it in real-time.
Feature: Partner Offers
We’ve partnered with leading SMB organisations like NAB, Xero, Google, Wix, Amazon, Upsure and more to provide you with discounts on any non-legal needs your small business may have.
On Low Pricing & Our Model
Our new Membership is purposefully designed to be affordable at just $800 per year. Other vendors are charging up to 10x more for services with far fewer features.
You might wonder, how is it so affordable?
Well, we understand that small businesses and startups don’t have large budgets to invest in legal services. As a result, we know many of these businesses aren’t consuming legal services at all.
For most law firms, it’s easier and more profitable to focus on helping bigger enterprises with bigger budgets. This approach leaves the majority of smaller businesses ignored, unprotected, and ultimately suffering the consequences of lacking proper risk management.
Instead, our business model is built on long-term relationships, technology, and scale rather than extracting high margins from small businesses. By offering a lower price point and investing in technology to help us deliver at scale, we aim to make our services accessible to the millions of small businesses and startups that have been overlooked in Australia, the UK and New Zealand.
This not only helps clients access the legal support they badly need, but also allows us to build a broader customer base.
We believe that providing exceptional value at an affordable price will lead to satisfied clients who are likely to stick with us for the long term. This helps reduce our customer acquisition costs over time and creates a steady, reliable revenue stream through renewals and referrals.
In essence, our lower pricing strategy is designed to ensure that we can continue to support as many small businesses as possible while also building a sustainable and growing business.
Stay Tuned & Sneak Peeks
We can’t wait to go live with the new platform, but there is still more building, testing and trialing to do. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more details about the platform including launch dates, exclusive previews, and early access.
For now, here’s a few screenshots of what’s to come:
Dashboard:
Document AI Chat:
Free Document Library:
And there you have it!
I hope this has made you half as excited as I am about the new platform, and we can’t wait to share it with you in the not too distant future. The launch is currently planned for mid-July 2024, so stay tuned.
To keep in the loop and be the first to know about our new platform’s launch, follow us on LinkedIn or Instagram. Or, if you’re an existing member, keep an eye on your inbox for the upcoming announcement!