Elefant: Small beginnings

Why even start?

Elephants, being the largest terrestrial mammals in the world, also have the longest gestation period among mammals. A female African elephant, Loxodonta Africana, is pregnant for an average of 22 months, nearly two full years.

The same is true for Elefant. It’s been a long journey to get where we are today. It took a long time before we even revealed it to anyone. This particular Elefant had a gestation period of nearly five years (we think the wait was worth it!).

Let’s start at the very beginning: Ian and Alex met in 2015, we both joined the Attorney-General’s Chambers on the exact same day. Ian went to work in the International Affairs Division while Alex went to the Financial and Technology Crime Division. But we often crossed paths at various events and quickly became friends.

Both Ian and Alex were regularly involved in technology and innovation initiatives while in government service: Ian had already begun to pick up coding and was building some document automation tools. We also had the chance to work together for several months when we were both seconded to the Personal Data Protection Commission (“PDPC”).

It was at PDPC that we began to see the potential for legaltech to radically improve our work. One request we worked on required us to search the entire corpus of statutes in Singapore for any interactions with the Personal Data Protection Act (“PDPA”). We struggled to find an efficient way to do this within our attachment period. So, we turned to tech. We devised a plan to build a crawler that would download the entire corpus of statutes, then run another bot that would look for statutes with the highest frequency of word collisions with the PDPA – the idea was that this would give us, roughly speaking, the top few statutes that were likely to affect the PDPA and that could then be manually checked for interactions.

Eventually, we both moved into full time legal tech and innovation roles: Ian went to the newly-formed Legal Technology and Innovation Office at the Attorney-General’s Chambers, while Alex went to the likewise brand-new Office of Transformation and Innovation at the Supreme Court. For the next couple of years, we got to work on the frontlines of legal transformation efforts in our respective roles, building, picking up project management and design skills, and meeting people from all over the legaltech ecosystem.

Through our experiences and engagements in the tech space, we realised that owning a project is truly critical to driving it forward.

Ownership is really important in innovation, because to make a good product, you need a clear vision and the ability to make quick decisions when you (inevitably) run into roadblocks. The people working on innovation projects also need to have the correct incentives, otherwise things get bogged down and eventually drowned in unnecessary busywork. Nothing incentivises like potential loss. We drew inspiration from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s views – if you want something to be good, the people working on it need to have skin in the game. There was no better way to align all of these thoughts than having our own startup.

By 2020, it became clear to us that we needed to have something to call our own. We just needed an idea.