Product preview
Illustrative interface, rebuilt for this page - not a live screenshot.
What this is
Founders sign their first dozen contracts - SAFEs, vendor agreements, employment offers - with no lawyer in the room, then find out what they missed months later. FoundersCounsel reads every contract a founder uploads, extracts the obligations buried in it, tracks IP and notices, and answers legal questions in a running chat, so a founder gets a first read before they sign, not an autopsy after.
The challenge
Startup legal work is high-stakes but low-frequency and low-budget in the earliest stage - exactly the segment traditional law firms are structurally uneconomical to serve well. Founders needed something between 'no legal support' and 'a retained lawyer', with enough substance to catch real obligations, not just a chatbot that sounds confident.
How we built it
01
Start with the contract repository, not the chatbot
Every contract a founder uploads gets its own detail page: parties, key dates, and obligations extracted automatically, so the founder has a structured record before any AI-generated advice enters the picture.
02
Obligation extraction as the core primitive
The system's job is to find what a founder is on the hook for - payment terms, renewal notice periods, exclusivity clauses - and surface it as a tracked item, not bury it in a summary paragraph nobody rereads.
03
Chat sits on top of structured data, not instead of it
The assistant answers questions with the founder's own contracts, notices, and compliance items as context, so 'when does my lease renewal notice come due' gets a sourced answer, not a generic explanation of lease law.
04
A weekly digest instead of a dashboard nobody opens
Rather than expecting a busy founder to check a compliance tracker daily, the system pushes a weekly email digest of what changed, what's due, and what needs a decision.
What it does
Contract review and repository
Structured storage and AI-assisted review for every contract, with a dedicated detail page per agreement.
Obligation and notices tracking
Extracts and classifies notices and ongoing obligations automatically, so nothing sits unread in an inbox until it's overdue.
IP management
Tracks trademarks, assignments, and IP-related clauses across the founder's contract set in one place.
Legal assistant chat
A chat interface grounded in the founder's own documents and compliance items, built on the Vercel AI SDK for streamed, structured responses.
Recurring task automation
A scheduled job rolls forward recurring compliance tasks automatically, so a quarterly filing obligation doesn't quietly become an annual one by omission.
Manifesto and network pages
A deliberately opinionated brand voice and a community layer aimed at the founder audience, distinct from the neutral enterprise tone of adnah's firm-facing work.
Tech stack
- TanStack Start on Cloudflare
- Deployed to Cloudflare Workers and Pages via wrangler, for edge-close latency on a founder-facing product.
- Vercel AI SDK
- Powers the streaming chat assistant and structured extraction, model-agnostic across OpenAI-compatible providers.
- Supabase
- Auth, storage, and the underlying data model for contracts, obligations, and notices.
- react-markdown
- Renders AI output - including citations and structured lists - safely and consistently across the assistant and digest emails.
Outcome
- Obligation types tracked
- Payment, renewal, exclusivity, IP, and more
- Founder touchpoint
- Weekly digest, not a daily login
- Position
- Between no counsel and retained counsel