How to improve SaaS applying Legal Design Thinking and Service Design?

A use case for legal design to improve the way we can enforce the trust and security for SaaS companies and drafting more understandable and useful contracts for all the actors involved in vesting and SaaS development.

Protecting SaaS with great legal contracts is an important step in mitigating risks and ensuring a smooth and successful business operation. Here are some key considerations to keep in mind when drafting legal contracts for your SaaS business:

1. Define the scope of services: Clearly define what services your SaaS business will provide, and what the limitations and exclusions are.
2. Service level agreements (SLAs): Specify the level of service that your SaaS business will provide, including uptime guarantees, response times, and other performance metrics. Make sure these SLAs are achievable and measurable.
3. Data protection and privacy: Clearly define how your SaaS business will handle user data and what measures will be taken to protect user privacy.
4. Intellectual property rights: Ensure that your SaaS business has the necessary rights to use and distribute the software and any third-party software or content used in the service.
5. Limitation of liability: Define the limits of your SaaS business’s liability in case of damages or losses caused by the service or its use.
6. Termination and cancellation: Clearly define the terms and conditions for terminating or canceling the contract, including any penalties or fees.
7. Dispute resolution: Specify how disputes between your SaaS business and customers will be resolved, such as through arbitration or mediation.
8. Governing law and jurisdiction: Clearly define which law will govern the contract and which jurisdiction will have the authority to hear disputes.

Overall, working with a legal professional experienced in SaaS contracts can help ensure that your contracts are comprehensive and provide the necessary protection for your SaaS business. 👩‍💼

Although all of the above is legally ideal, many of the legal documents, agreements, policies, memos, and contracts that are intended to protect development and investment rounds for development and testing by companies building SaaS are highly theoretical. They are highly technical, unfriendly, and they lose sight of the fact that not all agents involved in SaaS investment and development operations have legal knowledge.
With which it is necessary to apply legal design principles in order to improve the understanding and usability of these legal documents and further shield the operations referred to the creation of SaaS.

Context

Our client BoxyHQ is a UK based company that makes it easy to add enterprise ready features to SaaS products. Their solutions are open source and free to use.

To complement the kits that they currently have, our team met with the client and points for improvement were identified and the creation of a kit of legal documents that protect SaaS in its beginnings was devised, with which it seeks to provide an additional service to BoxyHQ customers and users, protect the new interactions and functionalities that are created with BoxyHQ kits, and give that added value to the flow of the service, since it is known that ideas, privacy and know-how, as well as the processes during the birth and improvement stage of SaaS must be protected.

Proposal and solution

After reviewing the different BoxyHQ products that are condensed into open source kits ready to use and integrate to develop and build SaaS.
Both teams found it interesting not only to create templates of legal documents necessary to shield the interests of SaaS or companies that use BoxyHQ Kits, but to create an exclusive legal kit for BoxyHQ customers and users that is free to download to complement the development kits that already exist in the BoxyHQ ecosystem, as a way of customer loyalty.

In addition, as a result of this collaboration, people who download the kit of legal documents to protect their SaaS, who need a “custom-made” template because the templates that are in the kit are not enough or their case is very specific, always You can use BoxyHQ’s referral to us to design and prototype “tailor-made” legal documents that best protect your interests.

Here we share a bit of the proposal and solution, as well as the process and resources used.

Project as is/ Template redesigned

In total we redesign 4 different prototypes of each type of legal document:

1. POC (Proof of Concept) — Attached Playbook POC Template
2. MAU (Memorandum of Understanding)
3. SaaS agreement — Attached Y Combinator SaaS agreement template
4. Privacy Policy template

Now we share our conclusions and takeaways:

• A new compliance/legal kit has been created to protect the interests and ideas as well as the data of the companies that develop SaaS platforms, and place this new product as an additional one to the kits already offered by the BoxyHQ platform.
• Interactive, functional and more friendly and understandable legal documents are achieved for end users who are not lawyers, but are development teams, businessmen, investors, among others.
• It is a way for small companies, which do not have sufficient funds, to have a good infrastructure and support that simplifies the processes and that customers can access in a functional way.
• Data processing is more secure and efficient, which generates security when contracting and carrying out proofs of concept and of its platforms with greater security in venture capital environments or financing rounds with exposure of its know-how to angel investors.
• Innovating with this type of initiative allows us to be at the forefront of data protection and cybersecurity.

So as you can see we not only redesigned the legal documents, we created new templates that are easier to use and more understandable for the client's users.

In addition, we have managed to create a new product idea that can be included in the kits offered by the BoxyHQ client on its open source platform for the creation of SaaS, but we have also managed to improve the user experience and improve the service offered. BoxyHQ expanding its range of products and solutions, applying legal design, service design and strategic design.

You can get to know about BoxyHQ kits for SaaS, services and solutions here: https://boxyhq.com/

About the team:

Josefina Oddone Laconte- Junior Legal Engineer

Naomi Antonella García -Junior Legal Design trainee & UX research

Lucía Chávez -Junior Legal Design trainee & UX research

About WOW Legal Experience: We are the first legal desing operations agency with global reach and with a team of professionals from different sectors who know the legal sector. We are not consultants, we are mentors and partners for the co-design, co-creation and co-enabling of projects, products, services and solutions that allow the legal and justice sector to innovate, ensuring that the experience of users and consumers in these sectors is the best.