A multifaceted leader and entrepreneur, Radhika Kabbade is a qualified Chartered Accountant, company secretary, and corporate lawyer. For the last 15 years, she has been working as a corporate lawyer, dealing with various esteemed organizations as a consultant. The first thing you notice about her is her never-say-die attitude. In the face of adversity, she continues to fight for her goals. Driven by her passion for simplifying legal processes and enhancing operational efficiency, she started her AI-aided contract review platform, Legalbook in 2018. She had to go through a series of hardships and roadblocks while acquiring funding for the firm. Recently, she was also diagnosed with Cancer. However, a true fighter and inspiring leader, Radhika refuses to submit to these challenges and continues to work relentlessly to achieve her dream of helping every individual in our society learn and understand legal documents in their vernacular language before signing them.

In an exclusive interview with Women Entrepreneur, Radhika sheds light on some of the important facets of her life as well as her overall professional journey, the challenges she faces as an entrepreneur, and much more.

Shed some light into some important facets of your life and your overall professional journey.

I come from a humble background. I lost my dad, the sole breadwinner of our family when I was in 11th standard. Throughout my whole life, I have completed my education while working simultaneously. I am qualified as a Chartered Accountant, company secretary, as well as lawyer. But I have practiced as a company secretary. I cleared my CS degree even before my B.Com was completed. Later, I did my LLB. During my final year of CS, I got married and my husband and in-laws have been extremely supportive throughout my career. I have also been practicing as a corporate lawyer for the last 15 years.

I started my career as a trainee at MRM Associates before joining Cummins India. After one year of articleship with Cummins India, I started as a Junior Partner at PDB & Co. Company Secretaries. Today, I am the sole partner at PDB. Throughout my career, I have worked as a consultant for some of the most esteemed organizations, such as Sandvik Asia, Harbinger Group, ICICI Bank, and many more.

What prompted you to switch from being a legal professional to an entrepreneur? Take us through the fundamental idea behind establishing Legalbook.

Throughout my entire career, one of the most common practices I have done is Contract Reviewing. Contracts have been the base of every commercial transaction. However, the contract review process takes a lot of time for a legal professional. I was always curious if there was any better way to execute the whole process. With the advent of AI, we started developing a product to aid legal professionals in reducing the legal turnaround time and in turn, help users reduce their contract reviewing time. We have trained our product based on 60,000 Plus contracts out of various domain areas, which is currently helping lawyers reduce their review time from around four days to just three minutes.

When it comes to signing contracts, many people in our society can’t understand English. However, they sign the contracts even without understanding them just to get the jobs. Even legal professionals usually aid you in reviewing the document before signing. However, no one helps you understand the contract, which has always bothered me. My long-term goal for Legalbook is to help every individual in our society learn and understand legal documents in their vernacular language before signing them.

As the Founder of Legalbook, what are the various roles and responsibilities you shoulder at the firm?

From a micro perspective, starting from Sales and Finance to Fundraising, and even attending conferences, I pretty much work in every field whenever required. At a macro level, my responsibilities include steering the organizational vision plans. As the founder, you have to take care of the top lines, which include working on your next product plans, as well as the bottom lines, which include daily revenues, sales figures, and targets, and getting your team to execute them at the product level.

In your opinion what are some of the most critical challenges you encounter as an entrepreneur in the LegalTech space?

As an entrepreneur, one of the major challenges that I have encountered is in terms of getting funding in India, especially for women entrepreneurs. Recently, I was also diagnosed with cancer that has relapsed, which was again another cross mark in getting the funding. LegalTech as a segment was pretty new when we started in 2018. We were exploring the idea of using data science for contract review, case management, and so on, which, even today, still doesn't have any competitors. However, it took us around five years to reach here as investors then were not even considering LegalTech as a segment.

Even the term Angel Investments stands for providing investment at a stage when there is no revenue. However, investors used to play it safe while inquiring about the product market viability, revenues, and so on, even at the seed level. While the Indian startup ecosystem, over the last five years, has evolved a lot, angel investors still need to stop playing it safe and look at early-stage funding as the early-stage funding.

Radhika Kabbade, Founder, Legalbook

A Multifaceted leader and accomplished professional, Radhika Kabbade is a qualified Chartered Accountant, company secretary, and corporate lawyer. She started her career as a Company Secretary and has worked as a consultant for many esteemed organizations for the last 15 years. Driven by her passion to simplify legal processes and enhance operational efficiency, she founded Legalbook, an AI-aided contract review platform that helps clients with comprehensive contract reviews at ten times the speed.