Luxembourg-based legal and document automation startup Docify is on the cusp of expansion a year after taking their first product to market.
Aimed at legal counsels, investment firms, administrators, banks and legal service firms, the tool went live in September of 2021.
According to CEO Christopher Georgeson, the bootstrapped firm’s strategy has been to focus “on supporting our clients and to develop Docify into the benchmark for automation in Luxembourg,” adding, “We are working with some fascinating companies and seeing a lot of vibrancy in this sector.”
Docify grew out of frustration with the time-consuming manual administrative tasks associated with legal procedures. “I had the impression I was spending so much time manually, producing standardised legal/admin documents,” Simon Joly, a former qualified lawyer and CCO explained, adding: “I found it painful not being able to allocate more time to added value tasks as a lawyer.”
At the time, Joly was working as legal counsel for an American investment fund whose Luxembourg office was headed by Georgeson.
The latter, a chartered accountant and corporate treasurer by background, was equally frustrated. “Finding good people is really a challenge, but to keep them happy and motivated, to retain them with all the manual tasks was a real challenge […] I wanted to present Luxembourg to the world as a smart place to do business,” he said.
“Finding good people is really a challenge, but to keep them happy and motivated, to retain them with all the manual tasks was a real challenge”
Docify CEO Christopher Georgeson
The 100% Luxembourg-based founders, met to discuss the concept of a technological solution that would enable the industry to scale, by automating legal, finance, and compliance documents. Or as Joly likes to put it concretely “Let people focus on the content of their jobs, not the manual repetition of producing documents.”
As part of the testing and the R&D, “[…] we had reached out to our network globally […] receiving over 1,000 different documents in multiple languages.” Georgeson said, adding: “We went through over 600 different versions of the tool. Testing was going extremely well and we were confident Docify was going to transform our industry. The beta feedback was really impressive and a number of companies were immediately interested in how Docify could help their business”.
Rapid rollout
This comprehensive preparatory work, along with the specialist backgrounds of the founding team, enabled a rapid rollout. According to Georgeson, the first Docify pitches were met with positive feedback. Since then, the firm has signed a number of investment funds, family offices, law firms and banks from the US, UK, French, Belgian and Netherlands markets.
And the team continues to improve the Docify tool, having this year added a contract management tool with integrated electronic signatures. In the coming 12 months, it will develop advanced analytics tools for clients to gather data on their transactions, business size and teams.
Docify is also hoping to add another five new people primarily in business development and coding, to its current team.
“We have invested deeply in Luxembourg and our goal is to become the reference in terms of legal, admin and compliance document automation,” Joly says.
