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Blakes Nitro, the innovation support arm of Canadian law firm Blake, Cassels & Graydon, last week announced a partnership with Toronto legal tech startup Founded to offer a document generation and management platform for startups. The platform will go live this summer.

Blakes chief officer of practice innovation Carla Swansburg said the partnership was a logical next step for Blakes Nitro “in order to scale that business, and in order to engage in some innovative technology and work in a bit of a sandbox space in terms of document automation and workflow automation.”

The service will provide startup companies and Blakes attorneys a shared digital space to tackle some of the more common corporate legal documents and processes that early stage startups need to work through. Startup groups can quickly generate and store the legal work they need in a shared space, while attorneys can leverage the Founded platform's automation and workflow management tools to work on those client documents.

The platform will also offer a legal checkup tool that allows attorneys and clients to review existing documents to identify potential improvements or gaps in current legal coverage.

Blakes opted to work with Founded not just because “it's always nice to support a local Toronto business,” as Swansburg said, but because of the platform's work with early stage startups and understanding of legal parameters. “They've really focused on some of the more substantive knowledge documents. They've married that with the process automation and married that with some of the process of the law,” she added.

Swansburg noted the Founded platform can prevent a lot of the traditional back-and-forth between attorneys and clients that typically accompanies work production. Additionally, the platform parses information to create reusable templates. “What this allows us to do is take information and turn it into data instead of reinventing the wheel,” she said.

Early startup companies often seek counsel and advice from attorneys in their first few years, but Swansburg said the platform isn't intended to cut down on the contact between attorneys and business. “We'll still have very high touch relationships with these clients, but it'll mean that it's a faster more seamless user experience for the clients in the early stages of that work,” she said.

The service will initially work exclusive with Blakes Nitro participants, but plans to eventually work with the broader startup community, along with potentially Blakes' more mature technology companies. “Hopefully, as the system matures and the clients mature, we'll be able to grow up with them, and the platform will be able to grow with them as well,” Swansburg said.

Blakes initially launched the Blakes Nitro program in July 2017, earmarking CA$1 million subsidized legal services for promising startups emerging from the Toronto-Waterloo corridor. The program, intended to give early stage startups access to Big Law legal advising, has since expanded to serve startups in Vancouver.