Pair-a-Legal

Opportunity

Throughout life, people encounter numerous legal documents— housing contracts, employment agreements, insurance policies, and software terms—written for legal precision but difficult for non-lawyers to understand.

With legal expertise being expensive and inaccessible to most people are forced to make important decisions without fully grasping what they're agreeing to. Often, the risks and consequences only become clear when problems arise, by which point it's too late.

Problem Validation

To better understand the problem we surveyed 44 members of public about their experience with legal contracts.
And for another perspective, we also reviewed the government's existing framework for evaluating SaaS contracts to better inform our solution.

We learned that

• People have low confidence in their contract understanding (2.98/5) at the time of signing it

• Despite reading blogs, researching with exiting AI tools and receiving explanations from agents, friends, and the other party

• They needed plain-english summaries highlighting key risks, penalties, important clauses, and understand how their contract compares to the Singapore market

For government contracts we also learned that

• The GovTech Legal team processes a high volume of contracts on a weekly basis, where they help requestors understand contractual implications and ensure informed decision-making.

• Legal clearance represents a significant phase in the procurement workflow, with opportunities to optimize cycle time.

• Streamlining this process could enable faster deployment of SaaS tools needed for product teams to deliver public-facing services more efficiently.

In the end this means

Most private individuals accept terms without understanding them.
For government contracts, the volume of requests relative to available capacity can affect turnaround times.

The Solution

This is why we built Pair-a-Legal.

Pair-a-Legal helps you understand contracts without needing a law degree. Upload any contract—insurance, rental agreement, job offer, software subscription—and we'll break down what it means, empowering users to navigate contracts confidently and prepare effectively for legal review.

Key features

Spotting Problems — We highlight risky clauses in plain English with clear explanations.

Real-World Context — We compare your contract to industry standards: "This deductible is 15% higher than average."

Ask Questions — Ask "Can I cancel early?" and we'll find the answer and show you where it says that.

Users can highlight text from the document or just chat with the document directly.

Built for Singapore — We incorporate relevant local regulations for individual contracts and align with whole-of-government guidance for agency officers, highlighting areas that may require additional consideration.

What the users said

For MOP- Facing:

Users rated Pair-a-legal 4.5/5 for helping them understand agreements before committing, and reported 4.17/5 confidence in understanding risks and obligations after use.

For WOG- facing:

Users rated satisfaction at 3.8/5, noting comparable accuracy to formal legal review but delivered in seconds instead of weeks.

What's Next

We're looking to expand to other use cases such as NDAs, Terms of Use, tender contracts, and data classification-based reviews.

Future plans include workflow integration, multi-user collaboration, mitigation recommendations, additional file formats, more official sources, and broader contract coverage.