Feras El Hajjar (App4Legal): “App4Legal is a workspace that legal teams can live in”

Leaders League: What is the story behind App4Legal?
Feras El Hajjar: It all began in 2018, when we started a consultancy with various partners. App4Legal is the fruit of a partnership with a couple of legal teams from different sectors (banking, telecoms and industry) and four law firms of different sizes, with some being multinational, meaning they have multicurrency needs and teams in a variety of different locations and jurisdictions.

This partnership led us to the essence of what a legal team is looking for in terms of processes, tools and technology. We thought long and hard on precisely what it is they needed, to be able to improve the way they work today, when it comes to the business processes that they have in place, the efficiency of collaboration when it comes to different stakeholders, and, indeed, overall productivity. 

The main goal was to help them to improve, digitize and accelerate their processes without downgrading the quality of their work. It took one year to come up with a concrete result that could be used by legal teams from different sectors, everyone from a large in-house company to a law firm. 

What sets your solution apart from others on the market? 
Since launching in 2019, App4Legal has been working day and night with legal professionals, to learn how they collaborate, what their current priorities & challenges are, and what the market is offering. Back when we started, we realized that the market was highly fragmented. There were hundreds of existing tools for time tracking, case management, accounting, contract management, time billing, discovery, and more… However, none of those solutions were covering the entire needs of a legal team! We wanted to disrupt the old-fashioned way legal teams worked, and bring to the market a full suite, a workspace, with all the required functionalities, that legal teams can live in. 

App4Legal is a complete workspace and a highly modular software solution designed to cover the entire need of a legal team working in law-firms or in-house legal department of any company, of any size, anywhere. That said, App4Legal is highly modular, meaning it can be adjusted and configured to tackle a smaller or wider range of needs. It’s also jurisdiction agnostic supporting multi-language and multi-currency and infrastructure agnostic where clients can host it the way they want (On-Cloud, On-Premises or On Private-SaaS with Local Data Residency).

A huge advantage over the competition is its flexibility and configurability, while remaining extremely user-friendly and intuitive for end-users. App4Legal is built with top-notch technology and Security Standards, compliant with Banks’ security (ISO27001 & SOC2 infrastructure), is GDPR certified with the ultimate enterprise data privacy and security standards in place.

What is the option that companies most often choose?
App4Legal addresses the entire market and all profiles as it’s highly modular, customizable and scalable to cover the required needs. We have two types of clients: the small and medium clients, preferring our Cloud/SaaS Basic & Business Editions purchasing directly in a self-service way from the App4Legal website and the large firms and enterprise clients that we serve usually in collaboration with our network of partners, present in different regions and countries. Usually, such enterprise clients (like large law-firms, Banks, Telcos, Groups, and others need local support and customized professional services to implement software solutions. 

You started out focusing on the EMEA region, yet recently moved your headquarters to the US. Why?
We did start by anchoring our operations in the EMEA. We shifted the headquarters to New York last year. App4Legal is global by excellence: we now have clients in dozens of countries and organic in-bound coming from more than 50 countries, with the US representing 30% of our operations. Our model relies on channel sales: we have 66 partners in different countries that implement the solution for our enterprise clients, including software system integrators and consultancy firms.

A huge advantage over the competition is App4Legal's flexibility and configurability

Also, the world is becoming a small space and legal teams do not operate the same way they used to. A legal team in France can hire lawyers in Nigeria for example, or ones who have a back office in Tunisia for the paralegal work or contract drafting. Such teams need to be able to bring people together in one workspace even if remotely. These past two years have reinvented the way legal teams operate. 

Would you say the European market is different from other ones?
We launched before Covid and the rise of remote work. At the time, legal teams found themselves lagging behind on digital transformation compared to other teams in companies. During Covid, we noticed a huge appetite for digitization, everywhere in the world. I do not see a big difference between legal teams in the US and Europe, other than the level of sophistication of the tools that they use. But this is a wave that’s covering the entire legal sector.

Currently, it is becoming easy to discuss digital transformation projects with legal teams. They have become more comfortable with the subject and are now more aware of the benefits digital tools can provide to their practice. 

Is the European market an important one to you? 
From day one, we have made Europe a priority. We started working with law firms which have offices in UK, France, Spain and Italy. The largest proportion of our clients come from the United States, followed by United Kingdom. We’re investing a lot in Europe. We are getting more solid partners, resellers and distributors, who can carry out financial transactions, implement App4Legal, train users, and provide local support. 

We are not looking to expand our teams physically, that’s not our model: what we want to do is to grow the ecosystem. We are strong in the UK, France and Spain. Italy and Germany are also promising. In each market we want to have the leading position. The product is already excellent, now we just have to raise awareness about it. 

How do you approach the French market, in particular?
France is a special case. We are investing in the French language, as the legal sector is very language related. Also, France is specific when it comes to support requirements. We invest a lot with our partners there. In this market, achieving excellence is not only about the software, it is also about the support that comes with it. The French version of our solution is a very reliable one. App4Legal is available in seven languages so far (English, French, Spanish, German, Turkish, Arabic and Russian). French is particularly important to us, since French is a key language in many countries and not only in Europe. We are giving a lot of care and attention to it.