When founding a company, it helps to have deep knowledge of the problem you’re trying to solve.
Bob Pritchett has felt the pain.
Pritchett is the founder of AllDrafts, a Bellingham legal software startup that recently released its cloud-based service aimed at individual attorneys and paralegals who create contracts. The company’s product — described on its website as a collaborative legal document editor that replaces multiple steps and “streamlines drafting contracts, from client need to signed agreement” — is now in what it calls “early access” after being deployed in the spring.
“We’re still making some improvements. But the product is up and people are using it,” Pritchett said. “It hasn’t been a secret; we were just busy building it.”
If Pritchett’s name sounds familiar, it’s likely because he’s also the co-founder of another Bellingham-based software company: Faithlife, best known for its Logos Bible study software and which he led as CEO until January 2022.
Life beyond Faithlife
In August 2022, after several months serving as Faithlife’s executive chairman and more than three decades since co-founding Faithlife, Pritchett founded AllDrafts. He readily acknowledges he’s the person in the origin story on AllDrafts’ website, which describes “a software executive who was frustrated with legal documents” and their Microsoft Word file revisions, PDF redlines and attorneys not set up for e-signatures.
“AllDrafts is about reducing the steps and eliminating many of the seemingly small tasks that actually take up a lot of time — and aren’t that fun,” he said. “AllDrafts just manages document formatting, cross-references, collaboration, e-signature, and error-checking so attorneys don’t spend as much time making multiple drafts of Word documents and re-reading them so many times.”
And as with a lot of new software, artificial intelligence is part of the product. But AllDrafts isn’t AI driven, it’s AI assisted. “We are not building the product only around AI,” Pritchett said.
Currently, he said, the startup is self funded with seven employees and an office at 115 Unity St. in downtown Bellingham. Six staffers are local.
“I considered a virtual company, but I really enjoy working with people in person, and I think there’s still a lot of value to that,” he said, noting that AllDrafts does allow hybrid work. “I chose Bellingham because it’s home and because our downtown has everything you need in a convenient and compact area.”
The renewed lure of building
Why do another startup after 30 years?
“I enjoy building things, and after Faithlife I wanted to continue building software,” Pritchett said. He said while he remains a member of the Faithlife board of directors and is a company shareholder, he no longer has a day-to-day management role.
“I’m enjoying being part of a smaller team again; we’re able to move quickly and everyone is focused on the customers and the product because we aren’t yet big enough to have much internal overhead,” he said.
The Pacific Northwest is home to several legal software startups, including Clearbrief and Predict.law in the Seattle area. Clio in Vancouver, British Columbia just raised $900 million on a valuation of more than $3 billion. But unlike the Bellingham startup, the other firms aren’t laser-focused on individual legal professionals who create contracts.
Pritchett said AllDrafts is solving an interesting problem by developing a useful tool and could have an impact beyond a product that makes contracts faster and easier to draft.
“This can help make legal services more accessible and affordable,” he said, “when attorneys can spend less time on tedious document creation, editing, and paperwork and just focus on the legal issues.”
Frank Catalano writes about business and related topics for CDN; reach him at frankcatalano@cascadiadaily.com.
