I have signed many contracts that I’ve only skim-read – I think most business operators do the same. I know friends at large companies who are reviewing multi-million pound contracts themselves, with no formal legal training or solicitor assisting them.
When I started Whisk.com in my university bedroom after studying at Aston University, it took us five years before we eventually got it working. Once working, we quickly had competing inbound acquisition offers and in 2019 we sold the business to Samsung. During that business sale process, our agreements got read properly during due diligence for the first time. Partner deals, employment contracts, IP assignments, terms we’d signed years earlier when we were too small and too broke to negotiate were looked at closely. Nothing blew the deal up – but I remember the sinking feeling of finding out about all our gaps. I had forgotten most of the contracts or poorly documented deals even existed. After five years we had worked with hundreds of people, and I had often put together terms in my own words in very basic heads of terms – then had never revisited them. I was too busy building our business.
As a result of the due diligence findings I had to go back to tens of people and ask them to sign written agreements – often years after employees had left the business or partners had stopped working with us. Clearly I was in a much worse negotiating position because I now needed these agreements in order to close my multi-million pound sale to Samsung.
I recently read up on the cost of contractual issues for small businesses – and it turns out I’m not on my own. The government’s recent Backing Your Business plan cites FSB research estimating that legal disputes cost small firms £11.6 billion a year. If you divide that by the working hours per year – it works out at £5.6 million every working hour. In my experience it’s a mixture of problems – missed auto-renewals, lack of clarity in contracts like missing statements of work, poorly written liability clauses without caps, and the expensive, lengthy process of chasing unpaid invoices. Apparently the average contested amount is £18,000 and it costs an average of £17,000 in legal fees and lost hours per dispute – so small companies tolerate legal issues rather than actively seek resolution.
I’ve found that AI is incredibly helpful with these problems. Most problems can be solved in somewhere between 2 and 10 minutes, which totally changes the maths. For example, I pasted a Granola meeting note and an old email chain in, and had a signed-ready side letter 8 minutes later. AI is great at writing contracts, especially if you give it good instructions and templates to use as a baseline. Giving AI background on your issue is also easy – you can just paste the automatically produced meeting notes from tools like Granola (my favourite), Zoom or Google Meet, or paste in email chains where you’re discussing or disputing something. AI can figure out your problem and write up documentation that solves things for you. If orchestrated properly it can also read through an entire portfolio of contracts in seconds and tell you what you need to address in plain English.
This problem is close to my heart – I estimate that I’ve spent over $2m on legal fees over the past 10 years. I built Git.Law to do this properly – it uses lawyer-written templates and workflows and runs checks over the AI’s output so the drafts are actually reliable. It’s an easy user experience that orchestrates different models and pulls on lawyer-created flows and templates – and runs specific processes and checks across the work to increase accuracy.
It isn’t legal advice, and for anything complex or high-risk you should absolutely involve a solicitor, but getting basic documentation in place and getting legal advice are two different things, and in my experience, most small businesses are missing the first one.
There’s also a wider point here for the businesses around me in the Midlands, where so much of the economy is small firms, family businesses and suppliers to much larger companies. When you’re the smaller party in a contract, you lack available cash to engage law firms for every issue, yet the other side has someone whose actual job is to know what’s in that agreement. You have a business operator doing their best – versus a top law firm as the counterparty and it isn’t a fair negotiation. Closing that gap doesn’t require every SME to hire a lawyer anymore – AI can level the playing field.
If you do one thing this week, make it this: pull every agreement you’ve signed into one folder and ask AI to help you identify the issues and key dates. If you want to do it easily with better results you can do it for free on Git.Law.
Nick Holzherr, Founder and CEO of GitLaw
Nick Holzherr is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of GitLaw, the AI agent for legal contracts. Previously the founder of Whisk (acquired by Samsung), he now focuses on creating AI tools that remove friction from everyday work. In 2017, Nick was awarded an honorary doctorate from Aston University. He featured in BBC’s The Apprentice in 2012, where he reached the final with the series’ best task-win record. He lives in the UK with his wife Priyanka and their two children.
