Legalese

Legalese Pte. Ltd., a Singapore-based legal technology company, was founded in 2015 by computer scientist Wong Meng Weng and former lawyer Alexis Natalie Chun Jie Shi. The venture originated from a shared ambition to apply computer science principles to the legal field, addressing the inefficiencies of traditional legal services. Wong Meng Weng is a serial entrepreneur with a deep background in internet infrastructure, having co-founded the early email service pobox.com in 1995 and led the development of the anti-spam standard SPF (RFC4408). His experience also includes co-founding a Big Data startup that was later sold to FICO, establishing Southeast Asia's first startup accelerator, JFDI.Asia, and holding fellowships at institutions like Harvard's Berkman Klein Center and Stanford's CodeX Center for Legal Informatics.

The company operates on a dual-track model. Its primary offering is a cloud-based platform that automates the generation of legal paperwork, particularly for startups and creative businesses. This service enables entrepreneurs to configure and produce documents for angel or seed funding rounds, manage corporate registers, and create service contracts. The business model centers on providing accessible and affordable legal solutions, targeting clients in the tech and creative sectors who find traditional legal practices cumbersome. Revenue is generated through its platform, which includes API and white-label offerings for document automation.

Concurrently, Legalese is engaged in a research and development effort to create a domain-specific language (DSL) for law, codenamed L4. This long-term project aims to translate legal rules, statutes, and business logic into a machine-readable format, with the ultimate goal of transforming contract drafting, management, and overall access to justice. The company has secured $418K in funding over three rounds from investors including Walden International, 500 Durians (now 500 Southeast Asia), and ISIF Asia, with its latest seed round closing on January 9, 2017. Keywords: computational law, legal technology, contract automation, legal document generation, startup legal services, fundraising paperwork, seed funding legal, angel investment documents, domain-specific language for law, L4, legal innovation, Wong Meng Weng, Alexis Natalie Chun Jie Shi, Singapore legal tech, API for legal documents, white-label legal solutions, corporate registers, cap table management, venture capital legal tech, law as code