IGHS67 - Interview with Wanne Pemmelaar at Filerskeepers

Jim Merrifield (00:00.834)
Well hello and welcome to the InfoGov Hot Seat. I'm your host Jim Merrifield and with me today is Wanne Pemmelaar at Filers Keepers. Welcome Wanne

Wanne Pemmelaar (00:10.398)
Hi Jim, I'm very happy to finally be here. I think we had this one in the making for months now, so yay.

Jim Merrifield (00:19.852)
Yeah, for sure. I'm looking forward to having a conversation. I know we've been at so many events together, have had so many conversations and enjoying all of them. But for our audience who doesn't know you yet, can you provide a brief introduction of yourself, your current role, and one fun fact about yourself?

Wanne Pemmelaar (00:39.9)
Yeah, sure. Like you introduced me, I'm Wanne van de Pemmelaar. I'm the co-founder and currently CEO for Filerskeepers And Lawstronaut, with Filerskeepers, what we do is we read all the laws in the world, not kidding. And then we take from their rules to tell companies how long they should store their records and data. And then we help apply those rules to the records and data of our clients through a software where you can actually build retention schedules.

Keep them up to date and integrate them into systems. that's what we do with the Filerskeepers and then as a spin off from Filerskeepers, We are about to launch Lawstronaut, And what we do there is we actually disclose all those laws to anyone who wants to build a legal tech or an AI product, including all the laws in the world.

And want to train their AI on all the laws in the world. And yeah, I've got a team of 65 people now, which is special to me because we started with only two a couple of years ago at the kitchen table. And we have grown without any outside investors, so completely bootstrapped family-owned business. And yeah, I'm now trying to keep the independence and the culture while

growing. Fun fact, I actually studied laws, but before I studied laws, I did the music academy and I actually studied guitar and more specifically flamenco guitar. So Spanish. And that was something I did since my childhood. And I really needed to get that out of my system, I guess. So I started

with playing guitar, was a very tough training. And at one point I was thinking, what am I doing here after four years of study? And I'm studying this teeny tiny piece of music. You know what, I'm gonna do something that puts me in the middle of society, and that was Laws. And as it turned out, I was a bit better at Laws than I was at playing guitar. So yeah, that's it.

Wanne Pemmelaar (03:03.546)
And another small fun fact is we're here at the information governance hot seat. I find it very hard as a Dutch person to pronounce the word hot. I always say hot. So usually Americans just look at me and go like, what did you say? anyway. That's it.

Jim Merrifield (03:26.542)
I love it. love it. So you got a great background. I might have to have you play guitar at one of these conferences that we're at.

Wanne Pemmelaar (03:34.736)
Give me a guitar and I'll have to play it.

Jim Merrifield (03:38.732)
Yeah, it might take you up on that. So you talked a little bit about your company or should I say companies. What inspired you to start these companies and how has your vision for business evolved over time?

Wanne Pemmelaar (03:54.13)
Yeah, sure. And now you're going to get a little bit of a monologue from me. So I do apologize for that. But my co-founder and I both have a background as global data protection lawyer. So we come from privacy. used to work for a top tier law firm in the Netherlands called the De Brauw Blackstone Westbroek very often considered the number one law firm on corporate matters. And we then moved over to what was then called Allen & Overy. It's a UK Magic Circle law firm. It's now called A&O Sherman. They merged.

And what we did is we built global privacy programs for our clients. And I was actually in the team that did the very first binding corporate rules filing for those of you who know the GDPR and the data transfer regimes under the GDPR. We did that together with Philips. We lobbied for it, got it approved. Now it's in the GDPR. Pretty cool. Anyone contemplating using the binding corporate rules, I would say don't do it.

because the GDPR has kind of killed that. And yeah, we did quite some litigations in the field of privacy, including litigations around retention. And I've seen actually the red spots in the necks of the regulators when talking about this topic. One day a client came to us and said, hey, we're in 78 countries. Can you just let us know what the retention periods are that are applicable to us? And the partner who we

working with. He was a public notary, never ever did any projects with retention. He said yes, of course, because he wanted to make some money. And little did he realize that he had said yes to reading all the laws in 78 countries in search of a few retention periods. Client was smart gave us a fixed fee budget. And then off we went and we engaged 60 law firms in 78 countries. Process got stuck almost immediately because this was taking up way more resources than the law firms had hoped for.

The guys in New Zealand thought they would be smart. They gave us four retention periods. They missed about 400 rules. This was not your average multinational. It was a family office of a very, very, very rich family that kind of collects multinationals for hobby and investment. And they were active in any regulated industry you could imagine, from oil exploration at sea.

Wanne Pemmelaar (06:15.89)
to retail, wholesale, but also consumer, anything. It seemed like every lawyer had his or her own interpretation of what the assignment was about. So some of the work was really well done, most of it wasn't. And some was just plain nonsense. So we had to go back to the law firms and we asked them, why did you write this down? And believe it or not, they said to us, we hired a student intern.

or a temp worker, they've left the job already. I'm not sure why they have written this down. Yes, we could have done better for ice principal checks, but the budget is finished. What are we going to do? So all in all, we had to write off 300,000 euros in cost going over budget. And that was the moment that my co-founder and I said, well, this needs to be a different business model. It needs to be a product, not a service. It should be scalable. It should not matter if you open up Slovenia, China, or the US. It should just follow the same structure, same style of reporting. And most of all, it should be cheap.

because we're just telling you what the law says, so why should that be an expensive product? So that's how we started with absolutely no research and no clients a couple of years ago. Fast forward to today, we now have 334 jurisdictions online, which is countries and states, all the countries at national level in the world and an increasing number of states.

everything that people would expect from us, US states, Canadian provinces, territories, Australian states, territories. But you know, Brazil also has 30 plus states. So there's always something more we can do. But our clients are currently not asking for it. So we're just waiting here. So we've got the order, we will research it for you. So we have over two and a half thousand multinational clients. It's a podcast, I won't name favorites.

But you can imagine any kind of industry, usually top three players in the industry, and that can go from lifts to social media platforms to, I don't know, we even have the number one producer of windows seals in the world. What we do is we read all the laws in the world, literally from A to Z per country or 2025.

Wanne Pemmelaar (08:36.496)
all the way back to the first law we can find, federal, national, state, provincial, subsidiary legislation, regulatory guidance. We look for rules that tell companies to keep records at a minimum, don't delete at a maximum. Those are deletion periods. And also we look at statutory limitations. Those are not rules that tell you how long you need to hold on to your records, but it might be good inspiration because you can end up in a litigation or an enforcement situation.

At one point our clients started to complain and they said, well, Wanne, this is a lot of rules and you know, we, one country tells me to keep this maximum five years. And the next one says, keep this minimum 50 years. What do I do with this? And that's when we discovered that companies basically have three problems when it comes to retention schedule building. The first one is not knowing the law. You can help with that. The second problem arises as soon as you do know the law and that is what choices do you make? Because it can get super overwhelming.

And then as soon as you've made your choices, how do you implement that in a very complex records and IT landscape? That has led us to do a few additional things. We started to do some consulting. I don't have a huge ambition in consulting, but it's very nice from a thought leadership and product development perspective. Work with a lot of other law firms, consultants, specialized or big four or whatever it is.

So we operate very well in that ecosystem. And consultants really like to work with us because we can also benchmark and kind of be their escalation boards. Hey, you know, this is what we see with other clients. And we launched two tech products. The first one was an API that allows us to integrate our data into virtually any system. Data governance, data discovery, privacy tool providers.

They integrate our data into their offering. We also have an increasing number of multinationals integrating their schedules or our content into their systems. But at one point, our consultants got so overwhelmed with the number of requests and that's where we decided to turn ourselves into a robot to actually build a dashboard algorithms logic where you can now say, hey, I'm in these jurisdictions, I'm in these.

Wanne Pemmelaar (10:58.622)
industries, build me a retention schedule and we will do that on the spot. take us a few seconds. It's fully customizable then. We'll give you rules at a jurisdiction level, so country state, but we can also calculate a golden standard. So what's the most optimal retention period given all those countries and states you're in and what's your residual risk. And then we can keep it up to date. if the law changes and what goes up from three to four years, we can actually

inform you about that. And the biggest challenge as soon as people have an up-to-date retention schedule is how do we then implement that? How do we make this real? So that's the conversation for us at the moment. How do I get this into my Microsoft, my Workday, my SAP? And those are really, really fun projects.

On the back of filers keepers, we started Lawstronaut, which is brand new. And it's basically, we created this machine that scrapes government portals, that knows exactly when laws are changing. And we, we use this for retention and we feel like that's that's nice, but it's also very specialized and niche. So we may just want to open it up to the world and so that the world can build their own applications, train their own AI.

We'll do a bit of a share the value will come up with our own boats and our own products but we definitely want others to also innovate because Very simple. I don't want to bet all my money on myself at the moment I want to actually see what others can do with this. Yeah, so that's That's that's the idea here So we're opening it up to any type of legal tech any type of legal department who wants to work with this

Yeah, that's the story. And yeah, that also means that during this whole process, I became a bit of a recovering lawyer, basically. To kind of let go of thinking risk and start thinking in opportunities. And that's very hard as a lawyer. So yeah. Yeah.

Jim Merrifield (13:00.398)
Thank

Jim Merrifield (13:09.772)
Yeah, you became innovative and it's amazing how you pieced it together and the company has grown over time. It seems like you've continued to, the team has grown as well and it's exceptional too to not have any investors and to really grow organically. That's amazing. So kudos to you.

Wanne Pemmelaar (13:19.058)
Thank you.

Wanne Pemmelaar (13:30.81)
Yeah, it, thank you. And for me, of course, it feels like ways too slow, way too little, but at the same time, the, having spent over a decade in corporate law, working with partners and seniors and peers and clients, I really felt that I needed some freedom. So this is kind of like, you know, yeah, I'm enjoying it every single day and

Sorry investors, I'm still enjoying myself.

Jim Merrifield (14:04.771)
Yes, yes,

Awesome. Hey, fair enough. So what do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities for AI and IG in the tech world right now?

Wanne Pemmelaar (14:17.04)
Yeah. Well, let's, let's maybe start with IG because I believe that IG is such a, so fundamental to AI and everybody is turning on co-pilot now. And then they're wondering why it doesn't produce the results that they were hoping for. And that's very simple. Your, your data isn't ready. Your records isn't ready for that. There's duplicates, rot in there, a lot of noise.

I think you should probably not be including in Copilot. Plus, you are giving it raw data and even with the best models in the world, to make the data ready in a little bit and explain to the AI what are the important concepts within an email, within a document, just helps. So I do believe that if you want to...

be good at AI in terms of integrating it into your internal processes. You need to treat it the same way as others would use AI for their products. And then they're suddenly going to look into the data really much. And then they're going to prepare it well and clean it up and do keyword extraction and all of that. So I am expecting a ginormous boost.

in in IG in records management and and and that's that is going to be the basis for it and the challenge there is we're we just you know retired a whole generation of people who actually know what what they're talking about and that's still ongoing and we aren't really replacing those folks fast enough so that's that's that's something that that the kind of

borders me on other hand, I also see that privacy has grown so big now that a lot of people are getting bored there and kind of looking around and they're finding records management like I did. that's there. Now with AI, it's gonna be difficult to make any predictions. What I find amazing is

Wanne Pemmelaar (16:37.81)
how extensive the projects are that I see now happening at our clients and that whole new departments get set up that, you know, all the investment goes to AI now that they're building these machines that are model and framework agnostic that are, you know, platform agnostic. It doesn't matter if you put it on Azure or AWS or Google Cloud and

and just massive data lakes that are associated with those. And so the investment is there really much and it's faster than you'll ever imagine. Everybody talks about, know, this is going exponentially. Yeah, I really see that. You know, sometimes people say, we need, we'll still have a few months or years before this gets built. No.

The big boys, they have built this already and they're now just ready to launch it. So it's going to be at a speed that is incomprehensible. I think it will change everything. I'm already envisaging that if we disclose all the laws in the world to folks who know what they're doing and build AI, then we can disrupt legal

pretty, pretty heavily. So that's one part. Then the challenge of course is gonna be in reliability of the outcomes in fair treatment of people basically. And that's where I think the biggest challenge is not just gonna be, I'll build a bolt and it does what I think it does. And it's especially the outliers.

that we need to be very strict on. the false negatives, the false positives, and the false negatives will cost some money, but the false positives might cost lives. for example, you're all clear of cancer. If the AI says that and it's a false positive, that sucks. Apologies for my language.

Wanne Pemmelaar (18:57.042)
So that's where we need to spend a lot of time on and frankly that's not where I see a lot of time being spent on. So that will lead to trouble in the future. But once we got that down, I guess at one point as a...

As a government, this is a bit dystopian perhaps, but you could start building your laws in a different way and you could program it directly into the systems and AI. And that's where I do think in one or two decades, this is where it will go to basically. So yeah.

Jim Merrifield (19:44.482)
Yeah, we'll have to wait and see. I'm sure we'll have plenty of conversations along the way.

Wanne Pemmelaar (19:46.726)
Yeah.

Yeah, why not? I always think that maybe, you know, I'll just blow up my own company and, and, know, I'm completely obsolete myself and you know, and AI runs it and will be on a universal income. don't know. But until then, let's have some fun. Yeah. I was, I was toying around with using my own name as a bot, but then

Jim Merrifield (20:08.302)
Yeah, who knows maybe we'll have the Wannabot.

Wanne Pemmelaar (20:19.8)
my wife said don't do it so yeah I have to listen well that's true yeah

Jim Merrifield (20:23.22)
Hey, happy wife, happy life, you know? But now I know we'll be seeing each other, right? Spring is conference season and then into the fall. What events are you planning to be at? Looking forward to just a few of them.

Wanne Pemmelaar (20:36.849)
Yep.

Well, I mean, we have to always go to the basics, right? And to our wonderful friends at Arma. So we'll be coming over to Infonext and Infocon this year. We are always going to IAPP shows more than...

And this time we will be also looking at more legal tech conferences because we want to of present ourselves as a broader legal tech company. then you're talking about ILTACON Legal Tech Talk, Legal Geek, those kind of conferences. We'll keep it legal for now and maybe we'll go to AI at one point. So it's going to be a lot of travel and a lot of fun.

Jim Merrifield (21:29.742)
Yeah, awesome. I'll see you there, I'm sure, at plenty of the events. We'll have some conversations. Now, Wanne, I know we talked about a lot here, but is there anything else that you'd like to share with the audience before we let you go?

Wanne Pemmelaar (21:44.696)
well, yeah, I mean, an open invitation to come to us and say, Hey, if I were to have, you know, access to all the laws in the world, this is what I would do with it. Yeah. And then I'm super interested to listen, to learn, and to see how we can help you to enable, that, yeah. we have our whole business model is scalable.

So even if you are an individual with an idea, we will have a license for you. So we want it to be very easy to get to work with us because yeah, I'm such a geek and I know you Jim, so are you. You know, I just, you know, I just want to see what will happen with this thing. I honestly believe that a lot of people talk about legal tech.

And nobody really has an idea yet. I think legal tech has been in existence for 10 years, but I think it's really starting now. That was also just only just a build up, know, digital signatures and stuff.

Jim Merrifield (22:56.174)
Yeah, no, there you go. Open invitation, right? Reach out to Wanne. I think we could probably stay on here all day, Wanne. We're gonna have to have a part two because I think the, I don't think this podcast could even contain the ideas that we've talked about over the years.

Wanne Pemmelaar (23:05.426)
Let's do this.

Wanne Pemmelaar (23:10.64)
Yeah, I'll come with friends next time. and then we do a we do a proper, you know, cigar smoking three hour long thing. Okay. All right, cool.

Jim Merrifield (23:22.318)
There you go, there you go. All right, cool. Well, listen, thanks so much for the time to our audience. If you'd like to be a guest on the InfoGov Hot Seat, like Wanne here, all you gotta do is submit your information through our website, infogovhotseat.com. And thank you so much and enjoy the rest of your day.

Wanne Pemmelaar (23:41.01)
Thank you,