Westpac Banking Corporation (ASX: WBC) has invested $10 million in Sydney-based Lawpath, creating a five-year partnership that is expected to help double the reach of Australia’s largest legal platform for small businesses to a million clients by 2030.

Lawpath, co-founded in 2014 by Top 100 Young Entrepreneurs listers Dominic Woolrych and Tom Willis, will utilise the new capital to “expand and double down” on research and development of the artificial intelligence (AI) technology currently used by the platform to rapidly grow its user base.

“This is a win-win for both of us,” Woolrych tells Business News Australia.

“The initial ($10 million) investment is great for us, but it also comes with a five-year commercial partnership where we can generate a lot more revenue. At a really high level this gives Westpac customers access to Lawpath products, and it gives Lawpath customers access to Westpac’s banking products.

“We’ve been working with Westpac for about two years with a light marketing partnership where we were sending customers back and forth. It was a really successful arrangement, so we decided to do a deeper technical integration.”

With the $10 million investment from Westpac, Lawpath has now raised $24 million since inception including a $7.5 million round in 2021 that drew support from the Gonski family, Glow Capital Partners cofounder Justin Ryan, and Barry and Darren Smorgon’s Sandbar Investments.

The company, which was founded on the principal of providing “accessible and affordable legal services for small businesses”, has more than doubled its user base from just over 200,000 in 2021 to 500,000 in 2024.

Lawpath estimates that it currently helps about 7 per cent of all new companies in Australia get started though its self-serve online legal platform which offers services that include customisable legal documents, workflows and legal advice to help set up or run a small business.

“One of the things these businesses need is a bank account,” says Woolrych.

“It has been a real pain point where they had to go find their own bank and submit all the documentation, whereas our goal now with Westpac is a one-click bank account from within your Lawpath account.

“Westpac has big demand (for business accounts) usually from people with consumer accounts who want to start a business.

“New businesses are exploding at the moment, so they want a solution where they send these customers to Lawpath, the biggest legal platform for small businesses.”

The partnership with Westpac will give Lawpath exposure to hundreds of thousands of Westpac’s customers in the small-to-medium business sector, a part of the business that the bank has been keen to grow.

Westpac currently accounts for 16 per cent of business lending in Australia after recording an 8 per cent increase in business loans in FY24.

“Lawpath currently supports half a million businesses to set up and grow, helping drive an important sector in the economy,” says Peter Herbert, Westpac’s acting CEO of Business & Wealth.

“As part of the partnership, Lawpath can help Westpac customers make starting and running a business easier, including registering an ABN, setting up a website or accessing expert small business legal services.

“Our investment in Lawpath aligns with Westpac’s strategy to partner with companies which offer our customers services to help run their business and make the complex simple.”

The advancement of AI technology has been critical to Lawpath’s growth in recent years with Woolrych noting that since the introduction of its new AI-powered platform 18 months ago, it has been delivering about 5,000 legal insights a day.

“AI has allowed us to move from a one-to-one to a one-to-many model where we have unlimited scale,” says Woolrych.

“We’ve been training our AI systems over the past 18 months with data from our 500,000 customers, from legal contracts and legislation to build this really smart legally compliant AI engine that can revise, draft, review and proactively work with the small business to keep them compliant – something that in the past has been reserved for big corporates with lawyers on retainer.

“Part of the Westpac funds will go into research and development to help expand Lawpath’s AI offering from not only legal services but also compliance and accounting.”

In 2022, Lawpath made a tentative push into the US market where Woolrych says the company maintains a small base.

“We currently see bigger opportunities in expanding horizontally in Australia in the near term before ramping up in the US,” he says.

“Our north star is to help a million businesses by 2030, and this funding definitely gets us there.”

Woolrych also notes that Lawpath has achieved profitability, which negates any need for further capital raises simply to “survive”.

“It’s all about funding for growth now,” he says.

“This is a long play. It’s a very complex industry, but over the past four years, with AI, we have been able to hit a critical mass and we have started to grow quickly.”

Help us deliver quality journalism to you.As a free and independent news site providing daily updates during a period of unprecedented challenges for businesses everywherewe call on your support