Small businesses can get buried under legal documents. She’s using AI to dig them out.

When Violetta Skittidi was in law school, she held internships at a few different companies as a paralegal. She noticed something right away, about each of them. These small to midsize companies didn’t have the robust legal departments one might expect from a global juggernaut, nor did they have the budgets to build such a department out.

As a result, Skittidi found that these companies had long—and growing—backlogs of legal documents that needed to be organized, processed, and filed. This, of course, became Skittidi’s job while she worked there.

“They just kept piling up, piling up, piling up,” she recalls, with the faraway gaze of someone watching a slow-motion disaster unfold.

Some of these documents, such as contracts or nondisclosure agreements, have facsimile versions online: downloadable templates that a company can fill in as needed. And some companies do rely on these templates because they’re free (or at least fairly cheap). But Skittidi says these templates can be riddled with inaccuracies and omissions, setting up a company for a potential legal nightmare down the road.

Other times, a company will have a rock-solid process for creating these critical legal documents, but no clear way to sort and organize them. And in most cases, Skittidi found, these companies simply counted on hiring outside legal counsel should they ever need it to settle a dispute—a costly and shortsighted plan.

Skittidi and a friend were hashing all this out one day. They were talking over the pitfalls for these upstart companies with shoestring budgets when it hit them: Someone should design a solution for this. And why shouldn’t that someone be Skittidi?

This is how Formulaw was born. The venture, of which Skittidi is co-founder and chief operating officer, assists businesses in managing their contractual affairs from start to finish, offering an affordable, efficient, and hassle-free experience, she explains.

“The entire point of Formulaw is to alleviate the burden from the companies that don’t have the time or the budget to hire lawyers, and don’t want to settle for very generic templates that they can find for cheap online,” she says. Instead, the platform “acts as a legal companion for these businesses,” walking them through the creation and execution of various types of legal documents.

The venture earned Skittidi recognition in this year’s Northeastern University Women Who Empower Innovator Awards. The annual awards honor entrepreneurs for their innovative, boundary-pushing work. This year’s recipients—students and alumni from the Northeastern community—were selected by a panel of judges and will receive a total of $500,000 in funding. For her part, Skittidi took second place among undergraduate alumnae award winners, and second place in the Powering Global Change category.

Here’s how Formulaw works: Let’s say a company needs a new contract for work it’s doing. Skittidi and her team can use AI (built in-house) to develop that contract from scratch. Or, if a company needs more help reviewing legal documents sent to its officials, then Formulaw will help search for terms or phrases that could open the company up to unnecessary risk.

“So let’s say, for example, there is an audit term, and you don’t understand what that term is. If you hover over the term, our platform essentially explains that term to you, gives you what the risk might be, and tells you how to tackle that risk,” she says.

Afterward, both parties can collaborate within the same platform—tweaking and reviewing the documents as they negotiate their terms. Once it’s settled, both parties can sign the contract with safe, verified signatures, all within Formulaw.

“Then, you essentially just launch the contract on our platform, and it’s automated,” Skittidi says. “So, the parties are notified when they have deadlines, for example, or when payments are due, so they don’t have to miss any obligations or key dates.”

And after that, if there’s ever a breach of contract, Formulaw can once again step in to help. A breach would automatically send both parties into a “resolution room,” Skittidi says, and guided toward an equally amenable solution by one of Formulaw’s vetted legal mediators. These mediators (who are real humans) aim to find solutions that work for both parties, and, crucially, keep them out of costly court or arbitration procedures.

“Formulaw is solving the pain of small and medium companies lacking resources to hire internal legal advisors or subcontract expensive law firms for drafting simple contracts,” says Eliza Loucaidou, an innovation and entrepreneurship advisor, and one of Skittidi’s mentors in the field. “In an era where AI technology offers significant benefits to businesses, Formulaw embraces legal AI making legal services more efficient and accessible.”

For now, Formulaw is registered in Cyprus and the United Kingdom, but Skittidi has plans to grow it into a global venture. Skittidi and her team recently concluded its beta testing, and launched a scaled-down version of the platform over the summer while the team raises funds to get it to full strength.

Whatever it takes, Skittidi is in it for the long haul. “I genuinely have a passion for problem-solving,” she says, as well as a determination to make it as a female founder in what is still a largely male-dominated space.

“In a more general sense, I just see that women in STEM and leadership and innovation don’t really have the support” of their male counterparts, she says. “It’s the reason they don’t step into these leadership positions in the first place. So I just honestly felt very empowered to just take that step and it was a very difficult one—but I’m quite stubborn.”