nu:legal receives 1.3 million euros for the digitalization of legal processes

The Berlin-based legal tech start-up nu:legal has completed a financing round of 1.3 million euros and is launching the public beta version of its platform at the same time. The financing round was led by Caesar Ventures. Entrepreneurs, AI experts, venture capital investors and partners from European commercial law firms also participated.

nu:legal intends to use the funding to further develop its platform and simplify access to legal services for small and medium-sized companies.

When bureaucracy becomes an obstacle to growth

The need is great: German SMEs spend an average of around 32 hours per month on legal and compliance-related tasks. According to estimates, this results in annual costs of around 61 billion euros for the German economy.

Many companies are faced with a dilemma: either they rely on traditional law firms, which are often time-consuming and cost-intensive, or they use generative AI solutions, whose results are not always reliable when it comes to sensitive legal issues. It is precisely this gap that nu:legal aims to close.

Combination of AI and legal review

At the start, the platform will focus on the areas of employment law and data protection. In future, the following processes, among others, can be handled digitally via the platform:

• Employment contracts
• notices of termination
• Data protection declarations
• Order processing contracts
• Compliance documentation

While the specially developed technology takes on standardized routine tasks, legally sensitive processes are also reviewed by specialist lawyers. The startup deliberately pursues a hybrid approach between automation and legal expertise.

From Freshfields lawyer to startup founder

nu:legal was founded by Bork Morfaw, a former lawyer at Freshfields.

During his time at the international law firm, Morfaw worked on legal tech and GenAI projects for international companies. In doing so, he recognized recurring problems, especially for start-ups, HR departments and medium-sized companies: high consulting costs, long processing times and a lack of access to pragmatic legal support.

He had previously developed "LegalGPT", one of the best-known legal AI products in Europe, which, according to the company, has reached more than 200,000 users.

Focus on German and European law

In contrast to many international legal tech providers, nu:legal focuses entirely on German and European regulation and the platform was developed specifically for the requirements of German employment law and European data protection legislation. All data is processed and stored within the European Union.

In doing so, the company is addressing a key criticism of many AI solutions in the legal sector: a lack of adaptation to local laws and regulatory requirements.

European infrastructure for legal services

In the long term, nu:legal plans to build a platform that lawyers can use to develop and scale their own technology-supported legal services with the aim of making legal expertise available more efficiently and providing companies with significantly faster access to legal support.

Following the launch of the public beta, the platform will initially grow in a controlled manner via a waitlist model before opening up the market more broadly and expanding into other European countries.