Shivam Singla on digitizing documents, building for India's regulatory reality, and the grace of beginning again

The entrepreneurial itch was there even before I entered law school. For the first two or three years at college, I explored the legal profession seriously. But I soon realized that the profession is riddled with inefficiencies. I thought, rather than working around these, why not try and fix them?

Documentation stood out because it is a cumbersome and frustrating legal process that cuts across businesses, sectors, teams and use cases. That combination, a universal problem and a deeply inefficient process, is what ultimately led me to build Leegality.

This happened very early in our journey. A DIY documentation platform was a relatively quick product to build, but our first conversations with the market showed us that drafting was a much smaller problem than we had assumed, especially for larger enterprises that already had mature legal teams and templates.

The consistent source of inefficiency was caused by the necessity of using paper in the process. Businesses could create and store documents digitally, but they still had to print them on paper for stamping and signing. This made the overall process slow, fragmented and difficult.

Because the insight came early and was reinforced repeatedly by customers, letting go was not hard. The evidence made the decision clear: The larger opportunity was to make the entire execution journey digital. We narrowed our focus to stamping, signing, and document execution related infrastructure, and that became the foundation of Leegality's current product suite.

What companies often miss is that e-signing is not merely a technology replacement for wet ink. A contract is often the core evidence and security of a transaction, and the workflow around it cuts across sales, operations, IT, legal and compliance. Moving away from paper therefore requires those teams to agree on ownership, controls, integrations and a new way of working.

So the technology is usually the easy part. The harder part is coordinated change inside a complex organization. That is why adoption can take time even when the infrastructure is ready. Once the change is implemented, teams are usually very satisfied; the real bottleneck is getting all the stakeholders to move together.

Digital documentation in India cannot be fully solved unless stamp duty is solved as well. An instrument must be appropriately stamped for it to be enforceable in a court of law, but stamping is a state subject, so the rules, systems, and operating processes vary from one state to another. Even an "e-stamp paper" may refer only to electronic generation on the back end while the customer still receives and uses a printed stamp paper.

To make the customer journey genuinely digital, we had to build from the ground up around the applicable stamp laws, the Information Technology Act and India's electronic evidence framework. The product had to give enterprises one compliant, auditable workflow while accommodating very different state-level rails behind the scenes.

You standardize the customer experience without pretending that the underlying systems are uniform. That requires deep legal understanding, local operating capability, exception handling, reconciliation, and reliability repeated across every state and use case. At this scale, the product is as much operational infrastructure as it is software.

We look for a few signals: how specific the obligation is, whether responsibility is clearly assigned, what evidence of compliance must be maintained, the consequences of non-compliance and, most importantly, how consistently the regulator is likely to supervise and enforce it. A rule changes behavior when it requires an auditable change in an operating process; if it remains broad or aspirational, it may create discussion without immediately changing workflows.

Our legal background helps us translate a regulation into product questions: Which process must change? What data or proof must the organization retain? Who is accountable? What will be difficult to execute at scale? We prioritize solving for regulations that are likely to create a durable market need rather than a short-lived reaction.

I had been following India's data protection journey since around 2013, and the idea of consent managers had interested us years before the DPDP Act was passed. Once the Act was finally passed, it became obvious that consent would no longer be a simple checkbox but instead a full, complex operational workflow. Enterprises would need a lifecycle system for notices, purpose-specific consent, multilingual journeys, withdrawal, records, and proof. That was substantial enough to require a dedicated product, and it also matched what Leegality already knew how to build: high-scale, compliance-grade digital workflows.

Most document fraud is identity fraud: someone claims to be another person and signs in their name. It can involve access to the intended signer's email or phone, or a person using their own identity credential to authenticate a document that was actually meant for someone else. A basic OTP or credential check may validate the channel or credential used, but it does not always establish that the intended person is present and knowingly signing.

That is where controls such as liveness detection, face matching, device and session signals, and a strong audit trail become important. They allow a business to test more than possession of a phone or ID and to identify suspicious patterns before the document is executed.

Some companies design these controls from day one; others add them only after an incident. The hesitation is understandable because every additional control can introduce friction. But it should not be framed as security versus customer experience. Risk-based journeys can apply stronger checks where the exposure is higher while keeping routine transactions simple. As volumes grow, even a small fraud rate becomes material, so fraud prevention has to become a shared design responsibility across the business, the platform and the signing journey.

Building for India teaches you that "easy to use" cannot mean easy only for a user with a new phone, reliable broadband, an email address and high digital literacy. At true scale, the product must work in rural India and smaller towns, across local languages, on low-power or older devices, over slow or intermittent connections, and for users with very different levels of familiarity with technology.

It also means supporting both assisted and self-serve journeys. The needs and incentives of the field agent matter, but so do the confidence, comprehension and consent of the end customer. In many households, one phone may be shared by the entire family, so the flow must account for shared devices, interruptions, retries, and clear identification of the person who is actually signing.

The most important shift is to design from the signer's perspective, not only from the business user's dashboard. A flow is not truly simple because it looks clean in a demo; it is simple when a wide variety of people can understand it, complete it, and trust the outcome in the conditions in which they actually live.

The actual execution of a document: signing, stamping, and exchanging it, is largely deterministic. It must be predictable, legally reliable, and fully auditable. Apart from areas such as fraud detection and risk assessment, AI has a more limited role in changing that core.

The much larger opportunity lies before and after execution. Before execution, AI can help create, review and negotiate documents against an organization's own playbook. After execution, it can turn signed contracts into an active knowledge base: extracting obligations, milestones, deviations, renewal dates and rights, and then connecting those insights to operational workflows.

The part the industry has not completely solved is moving from AI that merely answers questions to AI that can act reliably. A useful system must cite the exact contractual source, respect permissions, preserve an audit trail, know when human approval is required, and trigger the right follow-up action. Once those trust and governance layers are in place, document systems will evolve from passive repositories into systems that continuously manage obligations and compliance.

Optimism has been one of my core values for the last 10 to 15 years, but that does not mean it is effortless or unquestioned. In entrepreneurship, there are many moments when you wonder whether you are being optimistic or simply unrealistic. A difficult day can make you question both the future and yourself.

What matters is not avoiding those moments; everyone gets knocked down. What matters is how quickly you return to your center, get up again, and convert the setback into learning. One of Leegality's recurring lessons has been that a crisis often exposes what must improve. When we have confronted those moments directly, we have usually emerged stronger and sometimes turned the weakness into an advantage.

Vipassana helps me create some distance between an event and my reaction to it. It grounds me and brings me back to my core values when the hard realities of life hit. For anyone in a long, unglamorous grind, I would say: Do not demand certainty from yourself every day. Focus on the next honest action, shorten the time it takes to recover, and preserve your ability to begin again.