Most founders view legal as a necessary evil. Expensive lawyers, lengthy contracts, compliance roadblocks, and bottlenecks that stifle growth. When Vasile Tiple joined UiPath as one of its earliest employees to build its legal function, he took a radically different approach: Creating infrastructure that enabled, rather than hindered, the company’s rocket-ship journey to an initial public offering (IPO) within 3 years.

Vasile’s philosophy challenges conventional wisdom about when and how startups should approach legal operations. He designed UiPath’s legal framework with public company standards from day one – a decision that made IPO compliance “really easy” when that time came, while competitors scrambled to untangle years of legal debt. His approach extended beyond traditional legal work: Vasile pioneered using UiPath’s own robotic process automation (RPA) platform to automate legal operations, transforming what could have cost hundreds of thousands in vendor fees into streamlined, in-house solutions.

Now advising startups on building lean legal operations, Vasile brings a distinct perspective shaped by both sides of the technology equation. He’s built legal functions from scratch, negotiated with single-founder startups to Fortune 500 enterprises and discovered how modern artificial intelligence (AI) tools can democratize legal operations for even the smallest teams.

Vasile’s message to founders is clear: In the age of AI, there’s no excuse for letting legal complexity paralyze your startup. Foundations laid today determine the ability to scale tomorrow.

IPO-ready from day zero

When most startups think about legal infrastructure, they focus on immediate needs: Incorporating, signing first customers, hiring initial employees. Vasile takes a longer view.

“I thought about UiPath, for example, where I had the chance to build everything from the ground up with the idea of being a public company,” Vasile said. “It allowed us to put in place certain rules and certain policies and processes that were adapted to our operations at the time. But they really set the tone for what was coming next.”

This forward-thinking framework paid dividends when UiPath went public in less than 3 years. While other companies faced months of expensive compliance work and legal archaeology to prepare for their IPOs, UiPath’s transition was remarkably smooth because the entire framework was already built out.

The philosophy extends beyond just IPO readiness. Vasile advocates preparing for both best-case and worst-case scenarios simultaneously. “Things are happening fast and you don’t have the time to fix issues that you might have disregarded in the past with an excuse, saying that we were pre-revenue, we’re just small,” he said.

In today’s environment, Vasile argues there’s no room for that kind of thinking. “In the age of AI, that’s a lame excuse. Now you can easily put in place the essential things you need from a legal point of view.”

The cost calculation is simple: Fix foundational issues now with minimal resources, or pay exponentially more to unwind legal debt later. Companies that wait often find themselves in expensive audits, dealing with unclear IP ownership, or worse — losing deals because they can’t meet enterprise compliance requirements. By establishing proper governance early, startups can build scalable processes that grow with them rather than becoming obstacles to growth.

Internal rigor, external speed

For Vasile, legal strategy isn’t just about protection — it’s about creating a framework that enables business velocity while maintaining safeguards. He breaks this into two distinct but equally important directions.

“There are two sides: Your internal kitchen and the customer-focused side of your business,” Vasile said. “Internally, you need to make sure that the product that you’re developing is okay and safe. You’re using all the right licenses. You don’t breach any third-party or open source licenses. You have all the rights to sell and license your product.”

This internal foundation includes ensuring that anyone who contributes to building the product assigns all intellectual property (IP) rights to the company — a detail that proves critical during due diligence, but is often overlooked in early stages.

On the customer-facing side, Vasile emphasizes removing friction rather than adding more. “You need to ensure the smoothest possible engagement as a team,” he said. “Legal is there to enable you to do business fast and safely by protecting both your rights and your customers’ rights.”

This philosophy plays out practically in how startups handle early customer interactions. Rather than defaulting to lengthy non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or proof-of-concept (POC) agreements before customers can even test a product, Vasile suggests letting customers drive the legal requirements.

“If they want to use real data, of course, you can sign an NDA or a POC agreement, whatever makes sense. But I think at early stages, you need to leave the initiative in terms of legal compliance to what your potential customers feel comfortable with,” he said. “Your goal is to sell your product. Your goal is not to insert bureaucratic roadblocks in how they might access your product.”

The balance requires founders to be strategic about where they invest legal resources. Speed doesn’t equate to recklessness — it means being intentional about which protections are essential versus which create unnecessary barriers to growth.

Bootstrap your legal stack

Vasile’s framework for early-stage legal operations challenges the traditional playbook on multiple fronts, starting with the fundamental decision of where to incorporate.

“Based on where you’re located or how you think about your company, you can decide the right jurisdiction,” Vasile said. “My recommendation would be to look at jurisdictions that allow you to incorporate as digitally as possible.” He points to Estonia as an example where founders can complete the entire incorporation process online. The key is to avoid premature optimization. 

“You want to build a product that you can easily validate, that you have that product-market fit, and you have customers willing to pay for the product,” he said. “Once you have that validation, then you can think about more complex things like incorporating in Delaware.”

When it comes to essential documents, Vasile advocates for using readily available resources. “There are already tons of standardized license agreements that you can use for your product with industry-standard language,” he said. “You can do that yourself with minimum cost.”

The critical documents include terms of use, privacy policy, and license agreements all of which can be adapted using AI tools. Vasile emphasizes one non-negotiable element, however: Maintaining clear ownership of IP. “You need to have a freelancer or an employment agreement with developers to ensure that the IP rights are properly transferred to your company,” he said.

On team structure, Vasile challenges the assumption that startups need full-time employees from day one. “For the beginning, it doesn’t make sense to hire full-time employees unless you are well-funded for a couple of years at least,” he said. This flexibility extends to negotiations as well.

“If you have in your early days a template and a contract negotiation with your customer, just be frank,” Vasile said. “In good faith, ask why they want to change a specific clause? And then decide, is it okay to change it?” He suggests using AI to understand implications rather than defaulting to expensive lawyer consultations for every redline.

While many founders obsess over patents, Vasile offers a reality check, too: “If somebody would breach your patent, anyway, you will probably not have the money to go and litigate a patent in the U.S. courts. Your goal is to build a business, not spend time in court litigating. A better and cheaper protection would be to enforce trade secrets and ensure only the right people have access to your secret sauce. Not even VCs should ask you for the secret sauce which you need to keep secret rather than  submitting a patent with questionable enforcement capabilities.”

From cost center to profit driver

When UiPath needed trade compliance screening in 2016 — a requirement for any U.S.-based company to verify they’re not selling to restricted entities — quotes for vendor solutions exceeded $100,000 annually.

“We figured out that what they were doing with a very expensive price tag for us can be better done by our own software robots, for free right? They’re just automating repetitive steps,” Vasile said. “This trade compliance process involves going on the web, looking at lists published by different authorities, and matching names with prospects or customers.”

Working with UiPath’s RPA development team, Vasile’s legal team built a robot that automated the process. Whenever a new prospect entered Salesforce, the robot would validate against U.S. and EU restricted entity lists and flag matches for legal review, saving hundreds of thousands in licensing fees.

“That was the critical moment where we realized the platform can be leveraged with other legal processes,” Vasile said. The team automated privacy requests, contract review and other compliance work — an approach that eventually became a go-to-market strategy for selling UiPath’s platform to legal departments and law firms.

Today’s AI tools make this automation accessible to any startup. “Now by using natural language, anyone can create any app they want,” Vasile said. “You can converse with an AI agent to write the entire backend and frontend for you. We are entering the age of customer custom made solutions which represent an existential threat to legal point specific solutions which will not match the specifics a customer needs – they are not custom built.”

But automation alone isn’t enough — success requires systematic thinking. Vasile’s secret weapon at UiPath was playbooks. “In my third month at UiPath, I created a playbook for negotiating agreements,” he said. These playbooks mapped the most frequently occurring fallbacks for contract clauses, enabling new legal team members globally to onboard in two days rather than two weeks. Creation of playbooks was only possible once the essential prerequisite was done – standardization. Standardizing is the key to efficiency at scale – playbooks.

The playbook approach extended to sales teams. By documenting acceptable terms for payment schedules, support levels and governing law changes, UiPath empowered sales to close deals without legal involvement. “We reduced the level of our negotiated contracts by I don’t know how many times,” Vasile said.

This systematic approach transforms legal from a bottleneck into an enabler — exactly what modern startups need to compete effectively.

Scaling up without slowing down

The question of when to bring legal expertise in-house has become more complex in the AI era. Traditional benchmarks no longer hold the same weight.

“In the age of AI, the situation has changed dramatically,” Vasile said. “Now you may need an in-house lawyer even at a 10-person company because you might have a huge amount of customers.”

The key differentiator between in-house and outside counsel lies in engagement. “Outside counsel are reactive. They work only if you ask them to,” Vasile said. “They are not immersed in your operations to proactively identify issues before they become legal problems.”

The financial calculation often favors in-house counsel sooner than founders expect. “If your spend with outside counsel goes beyond a certain amount, an in-house lawyer would bring at least double the value for that money,” he said.

Legal requirements fundamentally shift at specific inflection points, too. When UiPath started landing enterprise customers from regulated industries, the game changed. “You need to make sure your internal controls are beyond basic,” Vasile said. “Sometimes the law expressly requires certain certifications for data processing.”

This creates a strategic decision. Vasile advocates radical transparency with enterprise customers about what certifications you have versus what you’re willing to build. “If you have a customer coming for a $5,000 deal asking for a $50,000 certification, that’s not worth doing unless it’s a pattern with additional customers,” he said.

The rise of AI adds another complexity layer. Data governance has become foundational. “Bad data into AI systems does not yield magic,” Vasile said. “You get garbage out with garbage in.”

For founders building today, the message is clear: Don’t wait for traditional triggers to think strategically about legal operations. Companies establishing solid data and legal foundations now will be the ones leveraging AI to accelerate past competitors still wrestling with fragmented systems.