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There were a couple of things I used to do in practice, where I remember thinking: Why is this happening?
Elena Tsalanidis and Justin Hansky are the co-founders of Deeligence.
Deeligence is a fast-growing legal tech startup that raised $1 million in its latest round to streamline due diligence with AI.
After hundreds of customer interviews, a brutal raising round and a major rebrand, Elena and Justin are helping lawyers move from grunt work to strategic thinking — and they’re just getting started.
We sat down with Elena and Justin to talk pivoting to AI, fundraising realities, the billable hour, and why not every lawyer makes a great founder.
Tell us about Deeligence — what is it and what problem does it solve?
Elena: Deeligence is an AI-powered collaboration platform for due diligence. We bring all lawyers working on a DD — from corporate teams to specialist teams — onto one platform. We move them from the data room to a client-ready report, faster and more accurately.
We’re solving for an extremely tedious and laborious part of a transaction. It’s what most junior lawyers call: “the biggest nightmare of their practice.”
What we do is bite off the non-legal, non-strategic work so lawyers can focus on the highly strategic questions that warrant their in-depth analysis.
And we’re an AI Company now, too — we capture the legal work done in reviewing contracts for the first time.
But you didn’t start as an AI company — what changed?
Elena: Funnily enough, we wrote in our original business plan: “We don’t think AI is there yet. We’re not an AI company, we’re a process-first company.”
We have to eat our words now because we’re totally an AI company, but that speaks to how far AI has come since we began.
But when we started, we were building a project management and collaboration tool. We then quickly realised that, instead of ensuring the lawyers work more effectively, we can now help them bite off the legal work that they're doing.
We knew implementing AI into our pre-existing platform was the right move – it was the logical next step. So that's what we did. First and foremost, we drastically improve the due diligence process, and the AI is really layered in.
How did the original idea for Deeligence come about?
Justin: There were a couple of things I used to do in practice, where I remember thinking: Why is this happening?
One was sitting there with two spreadsheets open and a ruler, trying to work out what had changed in a data room, which is objectively nuts.
The other was reading contracts back-to-back.
You’re at your desk. It’s 1:00 am. You can barely think anymore.
I kept wondering: How is this the way we’re still doing things?
I put that at the back of my mind for a while — worked in a few different roles, including legal tech. But once the technology caught up, we realised we could cut review time by about 70%.
It became a matter of timing, really.
Elena: We also both started in commercial law firms, and then separately went into legal tech.
Justin did his MBA and worked at a European legal tech company. I was at a UK-based one.
Throughout all this, we kept hearing about diligence.
So when we were back in Australia, we started interviewing lawyers. We talked to hundreds of people at all levels and in multiple jurisdictions, trying to understand the pain points of the diligence process.
Then, we started mapping out the process, building Miro boards, and tinkering with a potential solution that would solve most people’s problems.
I was sitting there with two spreadsheets open and a ruler, trying to work out what had changed in a data room, which is objectively nuts.
How did you find the transition from lawyer to founder?
Elena: Honestly, I didn’t mind being a lawyer. But when I got to working in a law firm, I remember thinking — this isn't it for me.
When I knew I didn’t want to be a partner, the question became: What’s next?