HAQQ’s Plan to Digitize Justice Across MENA

In this edition of Founder’s Hustle, we explore how Antoine Kanaan, co-founder and CEO of HAQQ, is on a mission to digitize the entire legal industry. From helping people find lawyers, to building an AI-powered practice management solution for law firms, and now integrating bar associations and governments, HAQQ is on a mission to digitize the justice system end to end. 

From Law Student to Legal Tech Pioneer 

Antoine’s journey into entrepreneurship began in the middle of Beirut’s 2019 revolution, while he was still a college student. Inspired by the socio-political energy of the time, he launched his first venture: the Lebanon Law Review. What began as a platform for legal articles quickly evolved into a fast-scaling research agency. “We grew from 2 to 100 people in just 12 months,” he recalls. The venture gained global attention, offering media, research, and event services with a strong digital presence. 

But the turning point came through a phone call. A woman from Alexandria reached out privately, seeking legal help in a domestic abuse case. “She couldn’t involve her family and trusted me because of the content I was putting out,” Antoine explains. He connected her with a local lawyer, but the calls didn’t stop there. Within the next couple of months, he had received over 300 requests from people around the world looking for legal help, a clear sign that many had no easy, trusted way to find the right lawyer online. 

“That was my ‘aha’ moment,” Antoine says. “I realized how underserved this space was, and how little technology had penetrated the legal sector.” 

What is HAQQ? (Watch Antoine’s Ted Talk about HAQQ)

The idea was born from a clear insight: “The legal sector was the world’s last $1 Trillion Pen & Paper industry.” For both clients and lawyers, the process of finding, hiring, and working together remained outdated, slow, and painful. HAQQ set out to change that, not just with a single product, but with a long-term vision. 

Over the past few years, HAQQ has executed this vision step-by-step: 

• 2022: MyHAQQ Legal Directory, a lead-generation portal that connects people in need of legal services with trusted lawyers across the MENA region.  

• 2023: MyHAQQ eFirm, a full-featured cloud-based practice management system designed for law firms. Lawyers can manage everything from client intake to billing, documents, tasks, and time tracking, all in one secure system. 

• 2024: MyHAQQ eBar, a platform developed with Bar Associations to offer lawyers streamlined access to official services and administrative tools, and eWallet, a secure peer-to-peer payment system enabling seamless transactions across the legal ecosystem. 

• 2025: MyHAQQ AI Digital Twin, a personalized AI assistant integrated into eFirm that learns each firm’s workflows, internal logic, and writing style, to act as a true extension of the legal team, enhancing judgment and streamlining day-to-day operations with precision and speed.
  

Taken together, these products show how HAQQ isn’t just building tools, it’s building infrastructure. From individual clients (B2C) to law firms (B2B), to government and bar associations (B2G), HAQQ is designing for the entire legal ecosystem. Today, over 1,000 legal practices use HAQQ to consolidate and streamline operations.  

Building an All-in-One 

Antoine and his team first launched The Legal Directory, a free, simple platform connecting users to legal professionals. It wasn’t flashy, but it served two strategic purposes: it built trust and created a ready-made beta group. 

“It gave us a strong user base and a strong pipeline,” Antoine explains. “By the time we started developing our next product, we had built relationships with over 200 law firms and legal professionals.” Those early adopters played a crucial role in shaping HAQQ’s next move: the launch of its practice management system, MyHAQQ eFirm, in 2023. 

While most startups are told not to build an all-in-one product, Antoine leaned in. “Our whole thesis is that law firms need a single solution,” he says. “Instead of piecing together Salesforce, Notion, QuickBooks, and Slack, we offer a one-stop shop, built for them.” 

That clarity came after a failed first attempt. “We initially launched a lightweight communication tool,” Antoine recalls. “But lawyers didn’t love it. It wasn’t enough.” The insight? Most firms weren’t replacing legacy software, they were replacing pen and paper. Partial digitization didn’t work. 

That’s when HAQQ went all-in. “You can’t capture a latent, high-value industry like legal with a narrow tool like a communication tool,” Antoine explains.  The approach was riskier and more expensive, but also more defensible. “When you build something end-to-end, it’s very hard to replicate,” he says. “The tech, the UX, the distribution, it’s all uniquely yours.” 

Still, Antoine is quick to point out: this model isn’t for everyone. “Apollo, a lead generation and sales outreach platform, is a great example of a focused tool. It does one job well, and that’s enough. But we’re not Apollo,” he says. “We’re building the motherboard of the legal industry—connecting firms, clients, bar associations, even governments. That only works if we’re the operating system, not just a feature.” 

From Vision to Execution 

Building an all-in-one wasn’t just a product decision. It was an architectural one. From the beginning, Antoine saw that legal work is fundamentally about information: who knows what, who said what, what’s written where, and most importantly, what it all means. “Everything in law is about data,” he says. “So we knew if we could structure it properly, we’d have something powerful.” 

That philosophy shaped every layer of HAQQ. The product isn’t just a bundle of tools; it’s a tightly integrated operating system for the legal world, spanning calendaring, communication, document generation, HR, compliance, and internal knowledge. The goal? To unify fragmented workflows into a single source of truth. 

“We’re pulling in information from every corner of the firm,” Antoine explains. “Emails, files, hearings, internal policies. And then we give that data meaning.” 

But structuring data wasn’t the endgame, it was the foundation. Long before ChatGPT made headlines, HAQQ was already betting on AI. The early vision was clear: AI wouldn’t be an add-on, it would be the engine. “We weren’t reacting to hype. It was our North Star from day one,” Antoine says. “Back then, I honestly thought we’d have to build our own OpenAI.” 

Even before the tech was ready, the team made deliberate infrastructure choices to ensure they’d be able to plug into intelligent systems when the time came. For Antoine, it’s all about long-term architecture: “You don’t need to build the whole tower on day one. But you better have a foundation that can support more floors later.” 

Enter the AI Digital Twin 

That long-term infrastructure is now paying off. HAQQ’s latest breakthrough is what Antoine calls the AI Digital Twin: a personalized AI that learns a law firm’s unique workflows, internal logic, and even writing style. “It drafts like you, thinks like you, works like you,” he says. “It doesn’t just speed things up, it enhances your judgment.” 

This twin can draft official contracts from a single prompt, run due diligence across thousands of documents, summarize and extract insights, spot risks or inconsistencies, generate reports or client communications, and even onboard new hires by answering internal questions, making it a true extension of the legal team, not just a tool. 

And it’s not just a concept. HAQQ’s legal team used the AI twin to draft an 18-page joint venture agreement with a single prompt, reviewed, approved, and signed without edits by the counterparty firm. The counterparty was impressed once they learned that the agreement was AI generated and became early adopters. 

The Compounding Advantage 

The more a firm uses HAQQ, the smarter and more tailored its AI twin becomes. HAQQ continuously processes the firm’s real-time data, building a unique, dynamic Digital Fingerprint™ that reflects how that firm thinks and operates. This personalized AI isn’t a generic tool, it’s a custom-trained partner that deepens its understanding and alignment with the firm the more it’s used. 

As a result, when two firms use HAQQ on the same case, each has its own distinct advantage. The AI twin doesn’t replace lawyers, it multiplies the legal team. Rather than leveling the playing field, it acts as a force multiplier, amplifying each firm’s strengths and knowledge. 

That compounding utility is what drives long-term retention. Today, law firms aren’t just testing HAQQ, they’re signing five, seven, even ten-year agreements. And because HAQQ integrates not only with firms but also with bar associations and government bodies, the entire ecosystem becomes more connected, and more defensible. 

Why No One Else Is Doing This 

Digitizing law sounds like a no-brainer. It’s a massive, outdated sector plagued by inefficiencies. So why aren’t more startups building in this space? “Most innovators don’t like lawyers,” Antoine says with a grin. “And most lawyers don’t like innovation.” 

The industry’s slow pace, heavy regulation, and high stakes scare off many founders. But AI is changing the equation. “It’s finally making legal tech exciting,” he says. 

He points to Harvey, the AI-first legal startup that reached a $5B valuation in two years, faster than Clio did in sixteen. That kind of traction reflects how AI has reframed the opportunity. “Suddenly, everyone’s paying attention,” Antoine explains. “And that helps us attract better talent and lower our customer acquisition cost.” 

While new players rush in with narrow tools, AI-powered contract review, legal search, and summarization, HAQQ welcomes the wave. “The more noise, the more problem-awareness,” he says. “But in the end, firms will buy from the ones with real products, serious security, and long-term thinking. Trust is the real bottom line.” 

That’s where HAQQ wins. Trust takes time to build, and Antoine’s team has spent years focused on quality, privacy, and credibility. “You have to own the whole user journey,” he says. “That’s what makes it hard, and that’s our edge.” 

It’s a bet that’s paying off. HAQQ has doubled revenue every quarter since launch, lean and profitable. “For every $1 we spend on customer acquisition,” Antoine says, “we generate $10 in revenue.” 

Customer Acquisition & Sales 

What’s behind that consistent revenue doubling? For HAQQ, it comes down to one core principle: do something different every quarter. “You can’t use the same playbook to go from $1K to $2K ARR as you would from $2M to $4M ARR,” Antoine explains. “Your business changes. Your perception in the market changes. So, your go-to-market has to change too.” 

This mindset drives a culture of constant evolution. HAQQ avoids rigid systems. When a new hire once asked for standard operating procedures, Antoine responded: “I won’t hand you old SOPs as they’re already outdated. I’d rather you create new ones. If we’re working off last quarter’s knowledge, we’re already behind.” 

That adaptive mindset was forged early. In the beginning, Antoine made the first 500 sales himself, calling leads, messaging them on WhatsApp, and even showing up at their offices. “You can’t teach someone to do what you haven’t done yourself,” he says.  

As the company grew, so did the team. Antoine began delegating parts of the customer lifecycle, starting with low-risk tasks like data entry, then moving on to lead gen, demos, and renewals. But one thing never changed, the hiring philosophy.  

“We only hire the best talent,” he says. “We train people on the market, the customer, and the product, but not on how to do their job. I expect them to be smarter than me and to teach me their job. This type of talent is hard to come by, but you’ll never be a world-class company without world-class talent density.”

For Antoine, attracting this level of expertise comes down to what he calls the “3 C’s” of hiring: Culture, Challenge, and Compensation. “The Company’s got to have the right Culture for ownership and accountability. The Company’s got to be Challenging, both in terms of the problem it’s solving, but also in terms of the potential achievements for each specific role. And finally, top talent deserves top Compensation so that they feel valued and at ease committing long-term to the Company’s mission.”

Today, 30% of HAQQ’s team are ex-founders and entrepreneurs, including former CEOs, CTOs, and CMOs—a senior, battle-tested crew built to scale.

Future Vision: What’s Next for HAQQ 

HAQQ is gearing up for a transformative year, with a major hiring spree underway across technology, product, sales, and marketing. This is to support the launch and marketing of two new products: an agentic AI native mobile app experience for law firms and an e-wallet enabling peer-to-peer payments within the legal ecosystem. 

HAQQ is aiming to scale revenues more than 10x in the next 12 months, targeting $15M+ ARR. That growth will be fueled by new products, wallet transaction fees, and long-term revenue from partnerships. 

On the fundraising side, HAQQ closed an oversubscribed round earlier this year and is eyeing a Series A next year to support its scaling roadmap.  

With a maturing team, bold product bets, and accelerating AI integration, the next chapter for HAQQ isn’t just about growth, it’s about redefining how justice is delivered in the digital age. 

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