What's going wrong today

If you, as CEO of an SME, look honestly at the legal organization of your company, you typically find:

  • Contracts sit in folders, in mailboxes or on the server. Who signed what when — a search exercise.
  • Nobody knows the termination notice periods by heart. The supplier auto-renewal slipped through last year because no one looked.
  • Accounting writes dunning notices in Word and estimates the interest "roughly".
  • The record of processing has not been updated in two years. At the last GDPR incident, nobody had a plan for what the 72-hour deadline means.
  • For an important question you call the external lawyer — and pay €280 per hour for something that could be solved internally with better tools.

This is not a reproach — it is the logical consequence of the fact that until now no affordable platform existed for exactly this size. That is exactly what we're changing.

Contracts under control

Every contract you sign, you import into LEGALinhouse. The AI extracts contract party, term, termination notice period and renewal logic from the PDF — you confirm. From that moment, the system knows the termination dates, reminds you 90, 60 and 30 days in advance and produces the termination letter in DIN 5008 at the press of a button.

When a supplier becomes disputed, you see on one page: contract, correspondence, outstanding invoices, deadlines — without having to ask anyone where the documents are. More under Contract Management.

Deadlines that don't slip

Deadlines arise automatically in LEGALinhouse — from contracts, from authority letters, from running dunning notices. You receive daily notifications and one configurable advance reminder per deadline, typically around 90 days ahead. Whoever is on vacation has assigned coverage that takes over automatically. Missed deadlines are documented, not hidden — that too is a compliance value. More under Deadline Management.

Dunning without specialist knowledge

When accounting has to write 20 dunning notices a month, that shouldn't be 20 instances of editing a Word template. LEGALinhouse automatically files outstanding receivables into dunning levels, calculates default interest to the day (with the correct base-rate premium — 5 or 9 percentage points depending on debtor type), considers the §288 BGB flat fee on B2B receivables, and produces DIN 5008 letters. Mailing franked via INTERNETMARKE directly from the system.

What this means for you as CEO: you know at any moment what receivables are outstanding, which are at which dunning level, and when court-stage dunning proceedings are next. More under Receivables.

GDPR without Excel pain Module planned

The record of processing under Art. 30 GDPR is mandatory — and usually the least maintained. For exactly this area we are developing an optional DPMS add-on module: record of processing with templates for typical SME processing activities (HR, accounting, CRM, applicant management), DPIA, DPA management, data subject rights and incident response.

Status: The DPMS module is currently in planning and not yet included in beta access. In the beta, for GDPR-relevant matters you already have the platform with matter, document and deadline management at your disposal — the actual DPMS module follows. More under DPMS.

When external counsel comes in

LEGALinhouse does not replace your external lawyer — and is not meant to. For court proceedings, M&A topics or strategic questions, you still need legal counsel. What changes: when you go to the lawyer, you don't bring a shoebox but a structured matter file. The lawyer sees the facts, the relevant contracts, the correspondence and the deadlines — and can do substantive work immediately. That saves the hours you would otherwise pay because the lawyer first had to reconstruct the situation.

When needed, you bring the lawyer in directly as an external user in the system, with default-deny access only to the relevant matter. More under Security · Access & Permissions.

If this sounds familiar: request beta access. We set up a tenant where you start with two or three of your own contracts.