We’re thrilled to announce our investment in Knuula, a platform that enables professional services firms to create, customize, and sign engagement letters, which represent the start of a client relationship from a legal perspective.
Professional services firms send around 350 engagement letters, service agreements, and other client-facing, legally-binding documents on average each year. With every batch of contracts, firms often need to make changes and include client-specific information, which requires extensive and wasteful manual effort today given the volume. On top of this, many accounting firms experience periods of intensive seasonality (hello tax season!), with inefficiencies adding to already stressful times.
When Jamie was working for an accounting firm, he was tasked with trying to improve engagement letter management at the company. He quickly realized that the tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming process needed to change and was excited to help. Jamie also realized the issue went well beyond his firm and branched into the entire professional services industry, which eventually inspired him to start Knuula in the closet of his apartment. Being a lawyer and full-stack developer with an MBA, he had the perfect skillset to build a solution.
Knuula makes contract generation for accounting firms more efficient by structuring all of the relevant data. By connecting directly with customers’ client data, users can create and customize legal agreements at scale. The company also has a template library, which can be private to a customer or publicly available. The company recently launched payment capabilities, which enables firms to receive payment at the time of signing. With Knuula, accounting firms can spend more time doing what they do best - accounting.
One of our investment theses is unlocking the source data from legal agreements via structuring all of the data in the agreement, which creates new opportunities to drive better processes and insights. Knuula is doing exactly that, using software to unlock and structure the data of engagement letters for the professional services industry. We believe engagement letters are a great place to start because in many ways, it’s the legal beginning of a client relationship. Knuula has the opportunity and capability to expand beyond engagement letters into client intake forms, service agreements, invoices, and more. Professional services firms are now able to run their businesses better and receive payments faster thanks to Knuula.
We love Jamie’s vision for contracting and we are glad he has since found a more suitable work environment than an apartment closet. Please welcome Knuula to The LegalTech Fund family and let us know if we can connect you to learn more.