Aussie Legal Tech Startup Set for Big Growth in 2021

Sacha Kirk of Lawcadia tells us how the intelligent legal operations platform supports high performing in-house legal teams & law firms.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Sacha Kirk: I am based in Brisbane, Australia, and we have been very fortunate to have had limited COVID cases over the past 12 months. There have been occasional lock-downs, but they have been well managed. It is not quite back to ‘normal,’ and I suspect it never will be, but I am certainly grateful to have my children at school and to have our team safe.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Lawcadia.

Sacha Kirk: Lawcadia is a B2B legal technology company that was founded in 2016. My co-founder Warwick Walsh had many years of experience as a corporate lawyer in the APAC and Europe regions, and I had worked in large FMCG companies in marketing and innovation roles as well as consulting to professional services firms. With my marketing and innovation background and our insight into the legal industry, we took an initial idea for the legal technology business and brought it to life.

How does Lawcadia innovate? 

Sacha Kirk: We are very focused on the customer and their underpinning needs, both functional and emotional. We use design thinking alongside a lean-agile approach of Build – Measure – Learn and try to iterate very quickly. We spend a lot of time with our customers to understand their challenges and pain points. We have a fantastic development and operations team that develops solutions to these pain points using our legal technology platform.

How does the coronavirus pandemic affect your business finances?

Sacha Kirk: Lawcadia is fortunate to have a stable client base and a recurring revenue model, so we didn’t experience a significant impact on our overall financial position. The pandemic certainly highlighted too many of our prospective clients (corporate and government legal teams) that they don’t have the systems they need, which has now created more demand for solutions like Lawcadia. 

Did you have to make difficult choices regarding human resources, and what are the lessons learned?

Sacha Kirk: As an already lean and agile organization, we did not need to reduce headcount. We focused on helping our teamwork from home as quickly as possible and focused on supporting their mental health and adjusting to the new way of working. While the executives and sales team are back in the office environment and have been since May 2020, our operations and development teams are still continuing to work remotely – they love it! We have also continued to maintain twice-weekly full team meetings and have a stronger team culture now than we did prior to the pandemic.

How did your customer relationship management evolve? Do you use any specific tools to be efficient?

Sacha Kirk: Our customer support did not change that much as we have always used Zoom for onboarding clients and using technology tools for support. Our sales approach saw more of a change as we were no longer able to travel, exhibit at events or have face-to-face meetings. Again this moved to a virtual environment. We are now starting to have more in-person meetings, and I am certainly hopeful that we can soon have in-person events as the digital experience is just not comparable.

Did you benefit from any government grants, and did that help keep your business afloat?

Sacha Kirk: The Australian Government introduced a JobKeeper program that has benefited Australian businesses, and we were fortunate to have access to that program for our Australian employees.

Your final thoughts?

Sacha Kirk: While 2020 was a challenging year, we were able to give our development team the time and space that they needed to build a new intelligent platform engine, Lawcadia Intelligence, which we launched in October 2020. This new technology is strategically important to us and the Covid period provided the opportunity for us to bring this significant innovation to market. We now have market-leading innovation with excellent product/market fit in the commercial legal services market, our revenue is growing, and we are optimistic for the future.    

Your website?

www.lawcadia.com