In this insightful interview, Kira Unger, CEO and Co-Founder at PocketLaw, discusses the driving force behind building the legal tech platform and the challenges faced by the legal industry. She shares her experience witnessing the inefficiencies and outdated practices in legal workflows, which inspired her vision for a comprehensive, AI-powered solution.
Kira identifies uncontrolled risk as the primary challenge businesses face due to the increasing complexity of legal landscapes and the burden of managing contractual obligations. She highlights how PocketLaw addresses these issues by offering a centralised, user-friendly platform that streamlines processes and empowers legal teams to focus on high-value tasks.
Merlin Beyts: What did you notice about the legal industry that drove you to build Pocketlaw?
Kira Unger: The dream of becoming a lawyer all started when I was just ten years old, inspired by my uncle’s successful legal career. Fueled by that aspiration, I graduated from Stockholm University with a Master of Laws (LLM) degree. Eager to put my knowledge to work, I joined the M&A group at Mannheimer Swartling, a top law firm in the Nordics.
Working at such a prestigious firm was a privilege, but it also revealed a stark reality: legal teams across the business were bogged down by manual, siloed, and painfully ineffective legal processes. What they all had in common was a reliance on outdated solutions – either multiple, unconnected software programs or entirely manual workflows. Imagine lawyers spending hours sifting through physical contracts or struggling with clunky software that didn’t integrate seamlessly. This inefficiency not only hampered productivity but also stifled innovation. Witnessing these archaic practices firsthand, I knew there had to be a better way.
While working at McKinsey’s Digital Labs, my co-founder, Olga Beck-Friis, witnessed the transformative power of technology across industries. We started talking, and it became clear that there was a universal need for a comprehensive legal tech platform to address the daily struggles businesses faced with their legal workflows. Existing solutions were fragmented and didn’t offer a holistic approach. That’s why we started Pocketlaw – with a vision to empower legal and business teams with a user-friendly, end-to-end platform that leverages cutting-edge AI technology to streamline workflows and create significant business impact.
In 2018, the Swedish Government recognised the potential of Pocketlaw, providing a grant of £200,000 to kickstart its AI-powered legal tech journey.
Merlin Beyts: What is the number one challenge that the legal industry has to tackle right now?
Kira Unger: As the world becomes more commercial, with partnerships, vendors, customer relationships, and similar, and with the legal landscape becoming increasingly complex to navigate, the biggest challenge for business is uncontrolled risk.
Businesses are burdened with numerous contractual obligations, and legal teams must find efficient ways to handle these obligations and not get bogged down in the details of reviewing countless contracts or struggling to navigate disparate software systems. This not only frustrates in-house teams and creates unnecessary bottlenecks but also exposes companies to uncontrolled risks that are difficult to assess, mitigate, and budget for.
Attempting to manage legal processes the same way as a decade ago will make it difficult to attract the right talent as the next generation of lawyers seeks more innovative approaches.
Pocketlaw tackles this head-on by offering a centralised, user-friendly platform for legal management. By replacing siloed, manual methods with integrated state-of-the-art AI technology that has a deep understanding of legal workflows, teams get a connected, integrated, and scalable experience. By adopting Pocketlaw, companies like Secret Escapes have empowered their legal teams with a self-service tool, freeing up capacity for high-value work.
In-house teams can leverage products like integrated repositories with AI-driven metadata tagging, providing full visibility and enabling data-driven actions and automated business alerts. This streamlines contract generation and review, allowing them to focus on the complexities of risk analysis and negotiation. As a result, productivity improves, and legal teams transition from reactive support functions and perceived cost centres to business partners that proactively protect the company.
Merlin Beyts: What do you think the daily working lives of legal professionals will look like in 5 years’ time?
Kira Unger: Predicting the future for legal professionals has never been more difficult, especially given the current speed of developments in technology. But, I’m convinced that in 5 years, in-house teams will evolve to become integral business partners, shifting from document-centric and repetitive tasks to actively driving central business initiatives and decisions.
It has not gone unnoticed that recent advancements in AI have been a game-changer for legal technology as well as for legal professionals. AI will augment legal professionals’ capabilities in a revolutionary way, empowering them to accomplish tasks previously beyond human capacity. Integrating AI into daily workflows will ensure unprecedented consistency, speed, and efficiency, liberating professionals from repetitive, mundane tasks and significantly increasing organisational productivity.
For example, we had a customer who had spent a whole morning reviewing a contract for inconsistencies before using PLAI (Pocketlaw’s AI assistant), which found the problem in three seconds instead of three hours. Such experiences underscore the importance and impact of AI in legal workflows.
AI-powered legal tools for research, drafting, negotiation, review, risk analysis, and more are already here, and their sophistication will continue to escalate rapidly. In 5 years, legal professionals will engage in deeper conversations and resonate with the legal materials to make informed decisions using AI.
I do not believe that AI will replace lawyers or in-house legal teams, but lawyers and in-house teams that use AI will replace those who do not. Given the speed of development, that will likely happen in less than 5 years.
Read the full LegalTech Diaries Volume 4: https://www.legaltech-talk.com/legaltechdiaries/volume-4/
