The Paperless Revolution: Why Software Still Hasn’t "Solved" Legal
In the world of B2B SaaS, we love to talk about disruption. We’ve seen Adobe revolutionize design, Intuit automate accounting, and AutoCAD redefine architecture. But walk into a General Counsel’s office today, and you’ll find a workflow that looks remarkably like 1993.
Shashank Bijapur, co-founder and CEO of Spotdraft, joined the SaaS Sessions podcast to discuss why legal tech is the final frontier of SaaS and how AI is finally closing the gap between the "paper process" and the digital age.
The Innovation Gap: Why Legal Got Left Behind
In 1993, Microsoft Word introduced "Track Changes." For the legal profession, that was the peak of innovation. For the next 30 years, while the rest of the world moved to the cloud, lawyers remained tethered to faxes, emails, and manual redlines.
Ubiquity vs. Innovation: Every dollar entering or leaving a company is governed by a contract, yet the process of creating them remained manual, slow, and opaque.
The "Darkroom" Phase: Much like photography before the digital sensor, legal work has been stuck in a "darkroom" of manual processing.
Democratic Software: True SaaS disruption occurs when a complex paper process is turned into software that is easy for the practitioner to use and democratic for the rest of the organization to access.
Strategy: Building from India for a Homogeneous Global Market
Spotdraft’s journey provides a masterclass in GTM strategy for Indian SaaS founders looking at the US market.
1. The Proximity of Markets
The US is the largest homogeneous market in the world. For a SaaS business to achieve massive scale, a US presence isn't just an option; it’s a prerequisite.
2. Avoiding the "Gambler’s Fallacy"
Founders often double down on failing ideas, hoping more capital will fix a broken model. Shashank and his team trashed 18 months of work when they realized their initial build wasn't scalable. Know when to stop failing.
3. The Mid-Market Sweet Spot
Spotdraft intentionally avoided two extremes:
Small Business (SMB): High churn, low ACV (Annual Contract Value), and high CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost).
Enterprise: Clunky, long sales cycles, and high "blast radius" for a small team.
The Focus: Mid-market companies where the In-House Legal Counsel (General Counsel or Legal Ops) is the primary buyer.
The AI Reality Check: Context is King
While general-purpose LLMs like OpenAI or Claude can draft a blog post, they cannot yet "be" a lawyer. The stakes are too high.
"I don't think in the next 10 years we are going to have people who say, 'I signed a million-dollar deal listening to a robot lawyer.' That’s not going to happen."
The Spotdraft Framework for AI in Legal:
The Problem: General LLMs lack contextual knowledge. A contract for Google looks different than a contract for a seed-stage startup, even if the legal principle is the same.
The Solution: AI should handle the grunt work—pattern recognition, minor fixes, and historical analysis.
The Human Loop: Negotiation and "shaking hands" will remain human. The future isn't AI replacing lawyers; it’s AI-assisted workflows that tell a lawyer why a clause is missing or how a new law affects 2,000 existing documents.
Lessons for the Founder-CEO
Transitioning from a Harvard-trained lawyer to a SaaS CEO required unlearning "legal" habits to survive the startup ecosystem:
Risk Reduction vs. Risk Taking: Lawyers are trained to reduce risk to zero. Founders must take calculated risks hourly.
Speed Over Perfection: In the early days, Spotdraft released nothing because it wasn't "perfect." The lesson: Put it in front of users and iterate based on feedback, not gut signals.
Attention to Detail as a Muscle: While you must move fast, the lawyer’s "attention to detail" remains a superpower when evaluating investor deals or high-stakes negotiations.
Key Takeaway
The future of SaaS isn't just better forms and UI; it’s the death of the "Create New" button. We are moving toward a world where you don't fill out a form to generate a contract—you tell a chat box what you need, and the software, armed with your company’s historical context and current law, builds the outcome for you.
