GitLaw's AI Agents Are Democratizing Legal Access for Startups
Legal bills are killing small businesses. An $18,000 unpaid invoice? Most agencies won’t even bother trying to recover it—the legal costs would eat up the entire amount. It’s an unfair system, and Nick Holzherr decided to do something about it.
After selling his previous startup, Whisk.com, to Samsung in 2019, Nick could’ve taken the comfortable route. Instead, he’s jumped back into the deep end with GitLaw—a platform that’s using AI agents to give startups and small businesses the legal firepower that used to be reserved for companies with six-figure legal budgets.
The Problem That Started It All
Nick’s entrepreneurial journey has been anything but linear. Originally from Switzerland, he moved to the UK as a kid and didn’t touch computers until university. Since then, he’s built a coffee company, an HR software company, and a successful exit to Samsung. Through it all, one thing became crystal clear: legal costs are brutal for small businesses.
“When someone doesn’t pay an invoice, you’re looking at $17,000 just to recover it,” Nick explains. “Most businesses just leave it. They can’t be bothered. It costs almost as much as the money they’re owed.”
This isn’t just about unpaid invoices, though. It’s about access to justice. Small businesses end up doing DIY legal work because they can’t afford lawyers, which means missed clauses, revenue left on the table, and unnecessary risk exposure. The system felt fundamentally unfair to Nick, and he wanted to fix it.
From Open-Source Contracts to AI Agents
GitLaw didn’t start as an AI play. Nick’s original vision was simpler: open-source legal templates. Why should contract templates be locked behind expensive legal software? Lawyers don’t actually own the IP in these contracts—they’ve evolved over hundreds of years across different legal systems. So why not make them free and accessible to everyone?
“We started with this idea of open-source contracts,” Nick recalls. “Everyone can have them for free. Everyone can just use standards to agree on things and get on with business.”
Then LLMs exploded, and everything changed.
Instead of just having templates with fill-in-the-blank fields, Nick realized the real opportunity: AI could actually orchestrate these templates. LLMs could understand context, adjust documents intelligently, and guide users through complex legal workflows. Suddenly, GitLaw wasn’t just a repository—it was an AI agent for contracts.
What GitLaw Actually Does
Today, GitLaw is an AI agent that can write contracts from scratch or review existing ones. But here’s the key: it’s not just throwing raw LLM output at you. The platform uses lawyer-reviewed, lawyer-created templates as a foundation and applies workflows that distill legal knowledge to improve what LLMs can do out of the box.
“It’s targeted at businesses, not lawyers,” Nick emphasizes. Unlike competitors like Harvey or LexGo that focus on law firms, GitLaw is built for founders and small business owners. It delivers output in Word documents with track changes and comments—exactly what you’d expect from a human lawyer.
But Nick is clear about what AI can’t replace: “If I was selling my company to another company, I absolutely want a lawyer who’s done it a thousand times before. Someone who’s been in the room and negotiated all those things.” There are scenarios where human expertise is irreplaceable. GitLaw is for everything else—the routine contracts, the reviews, the stuff that shouldn’t require a $5,000 legal bill.
Building in the Fastest-Moving Space Ever
Here’s where things get wild: building an AI product right now is unlike anything Nick has experienced in 20 years of entrepreneurship.
The foundation and architecture of GitLaw’s AI agent has changed multiple times already. Changes that used to take months now happen in weeks, days, or even hours. But it’s not just speed—it’s constant uncertainty. Models change. Best practices shift. Prompt engineering evolves. The cost structures of different models vary wildly. And just when you think you’ve figured it out, Claude opens up a plugin architecture for legal and you wonder if your entire category just got deleted.
“I’ve never experienced something like it,” Nick admits. “The amount of change, the amount of moments which feel make or break—I did not expect it to be this fast moving, this hard work, but also this exciting.”
The silver lining? Mistakes are more reversible now. “If I want to try a new visual way of chatting with AI, I can vibe code it in a day, push it live, and if it’s wrong, I take it down. No harm done.” That agility is a huge advantage when the landscape is shifting weekly.
The Roadmap Secret: Talk to Real Humans
With so much changing, you’d think Nick would rely heavily on data and automation. Instead, he’s doubled down on something surprisingly analog: one-on-one conversations with users.
“There are ways of doing user research in an automated way—surveys, video analysis, AI interpretation,” Nick says. “That’s valuable, but I think what’s more valuable is sitting down one-on-one with real humans and understanding where their problems are.”
This is where “taste” comes in—that intangible quality that separates products people love from products that solve problems technically but miss the mark emotionally. It’s understanding, better than anyone else, what users actually want.
Nick also leans on his team for this perspective. GitLaw has brought together people from his previous startup, Whisk, alongside senior leaders he’s worked with for 15 years. Different backgrounds, different perspectives, but all grounded in experience. That collaboration is invaluable when you’re navigating uncharted territory.
The Founder Advantage in the AI Era
One thing Nick emphasizes: the type of person you need on your team has shifted. Technical prowess alone isn’t enough anymore.
“It’s no longer just technical prowess,” he explains. “It’s the ability to have taste and make decisions and judgments. It’s intuition, proactiveness, curiosity. Can you give someone a task and they figure it out and get it done all the way through to done?”
In an AI-powered world, that ability to think independently, make good judgment calls, and push things across the finish line matters more than ever. And frankly, Nick’s background as a serial founder gives him an intuitive understanding of the problems his users face—something that’s hard to hire for.
The Unfair System Gets a Little More Fair
Nick’s building GitLaw because he believes the legal system is unfair to small businesses. It’s not about replacing lawyers or disrupting the legal profession. It’s about leveling the playing field so that a two-person agency doesn’t have to choose between legal risk and financial ruin.
Whether it’s reviewing a contract, drafting an NDA, or recovering from an unpaid invoice, GitLaw is putting legal power in the hands of founders who’ve never had it before.
Want to hear the full story? Listen to the complete episode with Nick Holzherr on Code Story to dive deeper into his entrepreneurial journey, the challenges of building in the AI space, and his vision for democratizing legal access for startups.