It's early 2016 when Maarten Truyens, after a two-year career as a software developer and decade-long career as an attorney and in-house lawyer, decides to take a sabbatical. His aim is to build the ideal legal drafting software, capable of improving all aspects of the legal drafting process. After a few weeks of research, he concludes he can build the product in about 3 months' time.
Fast forward to 1 October 2018. The initial deadline is a distant memory, but ClauseBase, even then the most powerful document automation tool for legal professionals, is finally ready for launch. After working for several years at an international law firm, Senne Mennes joins the team, determined to help irrevocably transform legal drafting.
One year later to the day, Robbert Jacobs rounds out the ClauseBase core team as he joins from Loyens & Loeff — one of ClauseBase's first clients. Over the years, ClauseBase continues to delight its customers, at least doubling its revenue every year in the process. All while fully bootstrapped.
In 2022, ClauseBase chooses to delight its customers even further by launching ClauseBuddy as the next step in legal drafting. The result is a suite of legal drafting tools capable of helping legal professionals of all kind to draft better and faster.
Maarten is an IT lawyer combining a passion for technology with more than a decade of professional experience in information technology law.
He started developing at the age of seven, and never let go of the programming itch ever since. Maarten built Clausebase from scratch in his basement, a place he leaves with great pleasure to educate students, legal professionals and other enthusiasts about the wonders of document automation.
Senne is a privacy lawyer who trained for several years at an international law firm. Having worked in close proximity with his clients, he thoroughly understands the needs of law firms as well as companies.
Senne’s journey into legal tech started with a childhood fascination for technology which carried on into his legal studies. His decision to co-found ClauseBase stems from having contributed to the legal sector’s time-honoured tradition of manual drafting and being determined to contribute to the new way of working.
Robbert Jacobs started off his career working as an attorney in a Big Law Banking & Finance department, where highly complex documents must be drafted within very demanding timeframes. He then spent a few years working as knowhow manager for the firm, focusing efforts on efficiently gathering and disseminating knowledge.
When Robbert first saw ClauseBase, he knew he had reached software nirvana. The combination of very advanced automated drafting software with the knowledge management capabilities of the clause library are a breakthrough in legal technology which convinced him to join the team.
Jonathan started off his sales career working in the software industry in Amsterdam. For the past few years, he has been specializing in SaaS sales and understanding the needs of SME's and large enterprises today.
From the moment he laid his eyes on ClauseBase, Jonathan was a believer. He is convinced that all companies could benefit from a tool like ClauseBase that that simplifies repetitive and manual work and is committed to contribute to a new status quo for legal drafting.
In his capacity as lawyer specialised in new technologies, Steven De Keyser, has first been responsible for the Belgian office of DLA Piper and later on Managing Director for DLA Piper’s operations in mainland Europe. In that role he has been instrumental to the success of DLA Piper in building a network in many countries from Spain to Russia.
In 2007 he was appointed worldwide Strategic Projects Director for DLA Piper. He was a member of their worldwide board and a member of their Executive Committee for Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
Steven is well known for the successful implementation of ambitious strategic projects, such as the integration of new law firms and teams as well as the creation of new offices all over Europe and specific client and sector development plans.
Steven De Keyser is one of the founders of Bignon De Keyser.
Passionate human being, living here and now.
Klaas is the former CEO of a software technology startup. He has a passion for IT and coaching people.
Susana has a PhD in Computer Science and has extensive experience in fundamental & applied research, creating deep neural network architectures for understanding visual and textual information.
She has published scientific papers on top conferences and journals in artificial intelligence and has won numerous awards, including the Google Anita Borg for her outstanding achievements in Computer Science, leadership and community involvement.
She has worked for NASA Frontier Development Lab as an Artificial Intelligence Researcher, and for Microsoft as a Machine Learning Researcher to optimize large-scale software development.
Greek-Belgian girl, specialised in food hunting.
Her hobby is searching for left-over food packages.
