Legal tech is worth billions. This start-up is diving in

The legal tech industry is still ripe for disruption. Start-up FiscalNote aims to bring the conversation to Asia, finds Tech in Asia

Uber is one of many start-ups that are joining banks and Fortune 500s in the race to go global. And its legal woes show that big or small, companies that expand internationally often get stuck in legal muck as they stumble with learning and adapting to foreign regulations. Local governments within a single country still struggle to get on the same page and make their information easily accessible, but it’s a problem that technology has largely yet to solve.

The legal tech industry is still ripe for disruption worldwide, and solutions for mending the legal gaps are still few and far between. FiscalNote, a Washington-based start-up, aims to bring the conversation to Asia.
 

CEO Tim Hwang envisions a future with a globally transparent and fluid legal infrastructure, where a patent lawyer can look up laws that are changing in Paris, Tokyo, or Singapore in real time as easily as one reads the news, and instantaneously understand the context of how it will affect a business.
 

“The legal industry is one of the largest industries on earth. It’s a trillion-dollar-plus industry, and when I think about technology and the broader trends within pretty much every major industry, the legal industry has not been disrupted,” he tells Tech in Asia on a recent visit to Seoul, South Korea. “There’s no data analytics, there’s no artificial intelligence, they barely have mobile applications.”
 

But current market leaders like Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis, which have built a $10 billion-plus market over the last few decades, have no impetus to innovate or change, he says.

This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.