Elizabete Ludborza, who studied our Law with Study Abroad in English degree from 2015-2019, has set up her own legal tech startup Kaveat to help social media influencers and models to understand and negotiate legal contracts.

After graduating from Warwick Law School, Elizabete worked for two years as a Junior Legal Officer for eBay in Luxembourg before moving to New York City in August 2021 to pursue her LL.M. in Law, Technology and Entrepreneurship at Cornell Tech. It was here she met her co-founder Dorothee Grant and software engineer Christine Shen.

Elizabete and Dorothee connected over their personal experience of the influencer and modelling industries and the power imbalance that exists in the relationships between brands & creators, agencies & models. Having experienced it firsthand, they discussed how brands and agencies were preying on unsuspecting young people by securing unfair contracts and the frequency at which these were being signed. They believe this imbalance is at the root of countless dangerous contracts, with potentially dramatic consequences; yet, such contracts are being signed every day.

“The only reason I noticed the unfair nature of my contracts is because I have a law background. Most influencers don’t have that,” says Ludborza. “There is a huge power and knowledge imbalance when entering into ‘exciting’ and ‘career-changing’ contracts, which actually mean that you might not be paid for your work or may even contain onerous clauses without your knowledge.”

Convinced that something needed to be done to rectify this problem, they pitched the idea during one of their Entrepreneurship classes at Cornell Tech. And so, Kaveat was born.

Kaveat users will be provided with an overall analysis of their contracts, providing simple and clear explanations of their content so they can understand what it is they are signing, saving them time and money. It is not a replacement for legal professionals, instead the app will hopefully serve as a space to connect those who are seeking legal advice with specialized professionals that can help users move forward with legal action.

Kaveat recently won the Cornell Tech 2022 Startup Award receiving a $100,000 pre-seed investment and a co-working space in the Tata Innovation Centre on Roosevelt Island, allowing the team to dedicate their efforts to building the platform full-time.

In the future, the founders hope to see Kaveat used not only to help young entrepreneurs navigate the influencing and modelling industries, but by anyone interacting with contracts, in order to make their lives easier.

Find out more and join the waitlist: https://www.kaveatapp.com/