Ahen Marco Klock and Philipp Harsleben founded their start-up in Bremen in 2015, Klock still believed in the paradigm: legal tech gets rid of the lawyer. “I even put it that way myself,” admits the founder today, less contrite than amused.
Because, of course, that’s not true at all. Today he employs 36 lawyers in his legal tech company. And Klock had to withdraw another statement in a certain way: The Rightmart Group – until recently called Atornix – promises to help those people who do not have legal protection insurance to get their rights.
After all, according to Klock, that’s almost 60 percent of all Germans. Accordingly, in 2018 he published an article entitled “The end of legal protection insurance”.
Somehow it ended up at a congress of legal protection insurers and ultimately led to one knocking on Klock’s door. “Apparently there were insurers who saw that the subject of legal expenses insurance and the legal services we offer were growing together,” says Klock. Perhaps they also saw that few young people would warm to such an assurance.
And so, in October 2019, Auxilia Rechtsschutzversicherungs AG made the strategic decision to invest a mid-seven-digit amount in the Rightmart Group. In February 2022, the Munich insurer increased its commitment and, together with Rightmart, invested a further 6.5 million euros in the legal tech for people without legal protection insurance.
Rightmart is digitizing the legal advice
Rightmart digitizes legal representation processes and reduces inefficiencies in the legal market. The Bremen-based company primarily uses software, a “technological platform” as the founder explains, on which his employees create a “structured database that we use to automate legal processes.”
In addition to the lawyers, Rightmart employs at least as many techies who, while not making the lawyers’ work disappear, are supposed to make it easier, more efficient and faster.
In this way, people should be able to afford a lawyer who actually cannot afford a lawyer. Because that’s Righmart’s motto, says Klock: “We want to make law accessible to everyone.”
An example: Many customers are currently suing private health insurance companies because of premium increases. Actually, explains Klock, each case is quite complex in itself, because a lot depends not only on the insurance, but also on the age of the contract and other factors.
Its clerks feed the information from all cases that are brought to them into the database. This is growing, and the more cases are recorded, the faster it goes because a growing part of the information is already stored.
“We represent the small against the big”
Rightmart takes care of matters in the areas of tenancy, banking and capital markets, insurance or traffic law. And also about scandals like the one about Wirecard, VW and Dieselgate or about loan revocations. Among other things, the company is the provider of the two platforms Dieselskandal-helfer.de and Hartz4widersprechen.de.
He promises visitors to the latter site to win up to 650 euros more per year. “We always represent the little ones against the big ones,” says Klock. But he doesn’t like to hear comparisons to Robin Hood.
They are also limping, because unlike the avenger of the poor, Rightmart also has a business model: Rightmart represents small businesses if the company assumes that enough people will win their case. The company finances itself through these profits and subsidizes those cases in which its clients do not win.
Clients themselves pay nothing to Rightmart. It is a mixed calculation, so Klock. The exhaust gas scandals are particularly good because the amount in dispute is high and the legal situation is fairly stable, and Rightmart gets 25 percent of it.
Many legal tech companies that have emerged in recent years work according to this principle. Successful pioneer: Flightright. The Berlin start-up has been asserting passenger rights against airlines since 2010, for example in the event of flight delays or cancellations. The company was very successful in its early days, became very well known – and often copied.
Many legal techs flopped
“Since 2015, a lot of companies have emerged saying, ‘We’re going to be the flight right for XY,'” says Klock. “We start online marketing and the clients come. But that’s just not the case.” Apparently, people are much less likely to look for a lawyer online than some founders believe. Many of the attempts flopped.
That was a not insignificant reason why Marco Klock ultimately decided on the strategic investor, even though he was in talks with venture capitalists.
“When I speak to VCs, I still feel like I have to apologize for the failure of the legal tech industry,” says Klock. In the meantime, he even avoided talking about his company as a legal tech.