In this episode we are joined by Helen Dukas, General Counsel at LawVu. Having recently accompanied the Prime Minister on her tour of the United States, LawVu is a real Kiwi SaaS success story now empowering in-house legal teams all around the world to operate more efficiently.
Helen shares her insights on the opportunities and challenges associated with taking SaaS to the world.
Helen Doukas:
The remote working culture that has resulted from COVID-19 has created opportunities for SaaS companies to take their products to the world, and this is certainly the case for LawVu.
LawVu is headquartered in Tauranga, New Zealand, and it's got customers all over the globe. During the pandemic, we expanded into the US and the UK, and now the US is our biggest customer base and investors have also recognised this opportunity. Last year, LawVu had its Series A fundraising round. This was led by Insight Partners from the US, and AirTree from Australia. Both of these investors doubled down earlier this year with a Series A extension.
While we're working in an increasingly borderless world from a technology perspective, laws are still very much managed at a national level. This can be a challenge to SaaS companies. SaaS companies are typically based around a single product or suite of products that's exported to all customers, and this single product needs to navigate or take into consideration the differing legal requirements in different parts of the world.
As a lawyer, I love the idea of being able to have standardised terms and conditions. This isn't always possible when you're looking at different requirements for different customers. The types of legal regimes that are particularly pertinent to SaaS and which tend to differ include privacy and data regimes. While organisations would love the ability to pull all their data together and to use it in a singular way, this isn't always possible. Increasingly, organisations are segregating data on a jurisdictional basis and applying different rules, depending on where the data was collected. Increasingly, global best practices and standards are being developed to help cut through some of these issues. For example, global security standards are being developed.
I love that a Tauranga-based SaaS company is taking its product to the world. This is because I love the idea that we live in a time where regardless of where an organisation is headquartered, it's the best product, the best idea, and the best execution that will thrive. As lawyers, we can enable this. We just need to shift our mentality from the local to a global one.
You can view the Digital Download Series episodes here.