Aleksandra Polak, Assistant General Counsel at Billtrust in USA, explains how Legal becomes a core driver of global SaaS expansion – shaping revenue, enabling scale, and designing the frameworks that turn international growth into predictable, repeatable ARR.
For SaaS businesses, global growth isn’t just about entering new markets but about sustaining recurring revenue across them.
Legal plays a central role here: structuring contracts, managing local compliance without losing velocity, and designing scalable frameworks that secure revenue long term.
Legal isn’t just a control function. It’s a revenue enabler.
When growing the business, you need focus. Not dispersed attention to tens of different projects, governing laws, and templates.
When scaling globally, resist the urge to localise every contract. Stick with governing laws you, and the market, know and trust. The obvious choice would be laws of England and Wales, Delaware, New York, or Switzerland.
You’re anxious you’ll be negotiating with legal teams from different jurisdictions? Don’t be:
If you know one of the common law systems, you can comfortably work with lawyers from the UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Ireland.
If you know an EU jurisdiction, then most continental systems share the same roots: Roman law, the Napoleonic Code, and EU regulation.
Law is all about concepts: obligations, liability, warranties, claims. These concepts are in principle the same among common law and civil law systems – local differences become manageable.
Plus, SaaS contracts are increasingly standardised globally.
The same applies to privacy laws: GDPR, LGPD, and CCPA share 80% of principles.
“When scaling globally, resist the urge to localise every contract. Stick with governing laws you, and the market, know and trust.”
Every jurisdiction wants its own version of your contract. Most don’t need it.
Localise only where it drives compliance or cash flow:
• Data privacy and local disclosures
• Tax terms
• Consumer or mandatory protection clauses
Skip the rest: same governing law, same structure, same commercial logic.
Uniform templates help scale.
Legal should own and update those templates, not external counsel, to keep scale and control in-house.
And the template and risk assessment must be “good enough to launch.” Absolute certainty kills momentum.
Strategic compliance means managing risk deliberately, not waiting for perfect.
Sales, billing, customer success, and support have their own systems. Yours need to seamlessly interact with these. They know the product and customers better than lawyers.
Do not design your systems and templates before making sure they will be useful for those who earn money for your company.
Across every market, the goal is the same: protect predictable cash flow. Contracts define how you earn, renew, and retain revenue.
That means you need to cover and negotiate:
• Upfront payments
• Tight payment terms
• Fixed contract durations
• Automatic renewals
• Clear termination rights
• Annual price adjustments
Every clause above is a margin driver. Cooperate closely with Sales to directly shape recurring revenue.
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