Vasile Tiple, the first in-house counsel and former General Counsel of UiPath, has left that role to become Head of Legal Automation – in which capacity he intends to develop a new and expanded Legal Automation Program as part of the company's business offering.
In his new role, Tiple is putting a dedicated cross-functional team in place, with specific legal, technical, pre-sales, sales, and customer success expertise towards designing, implementing, and promoting legal automation solutions. According to Tiple, the initiative originated in one of the most successful projects he created as UiPath GC: a Legal Automation Program through which he implemented, for the first time, legal robots at scale to execute vital company processes while, at the same time, creating a venue for discussion within the legal industry on "how new technologies and automation can help bring Legal into the 21 century."
UiPath was founded in 2005 in Bucharest, Romania, as DeskOver, to build automation scripts. In 2012, the company switched its focus to Robotic Process Automation (RPA). It concluded a EUR 30 million Series A investment round in 2017 with Earlybird Venture Capital, Credo Ventures, and Seedcamp as participants (as reported by CEE Legal Matters on May 5, 2017). In 2018, Accel Partners was the lead investor in a USD 153 million Series B funding round for the company, bringing the company to a USD 1.1 billion valuation – making it the first Romanian tech start-up to reach that level (as reported by CEE Legal Matters on March 13, 2018).
Tiple started his legal career as a legal adviser with Transparency International Romania in 2010. In June 2012, he joined Fashion Days Shopping, then took on the role of Senior Legal Specialist with Adobe in October of the same year. He assumed the first permanent in-house legal role with UiPath in 2016 to ultimately become the General Counsel of the company, which involved, Tiple says, "building the in-house legal team, setting up essential procedures for the company to scale up in a legally safe and operationally efficient manner, and overseeing the financing rounds."
Tiple reports that once he achieved the "objective of creating a self-sufficient team covering all critical processes of the company and as the company stabilized its operations and successfully completed series A, B, C and D financing, the company started to explore IPO opportunities as a US-company so a US-based based GC was brought in." In May 2019, UiPath announced it named former SAP Executive Brad Brubaker as Chief Legal Officer, General Counsel to "support the company’s continued global growth."
Now that the transition is done, Tiple moved outside of the legal team to "develop and grow a separate line of business – one of his first successful projects: Legal Automation." The next challenge is to take what he describes as a project originally initiated for the in-house legal function and transform it into a new business line for the company while continuing to scale up the project. As such, he extended the scope of the initial project to a more commercial approach to ensure the success of the initiative with all UiPath customers and partners. He now works to identify and include specific legal-focused features which can be added to the UiPath Platform roadmap from an early product development stage (such as ML/AI and document understanding capabilities for contracts and legal provisions) to establishing partnerships with key legal and tech vendors (to extend UiPath partner ecosystem to cover legal and compliance services), to designing and implementing new licensing models to address specific solution requirements, design the go-to-market strategy, and identify opportunities for improving legal and compliance processes with the goal of making UiPath Platform the go-to automation suite for the legal industry.
Tiple contributed an article in the 2017 CEE Legal Matters Corporate Counsel Handbook titled "Tackling the General Counsel Role" accessible here.
