25th November 2021: Our co-founder and CEO, Pulkit Anand, joined the Citizen Innovation Lab's round table discussion as a panel member along with:
Komal Gupta(Chief Innovations Officer with Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas and Founder of Prambh)
Namita Shah.
Tariq Mustafa moderated the discussion.
The webinar broadly touched on 3 crucial aspects-
- Create a deeper understanding of the challenges of scaling up business models in the legal technology sector.
- How is the ecosystem supporting startups?
- What are some gaps that the entrepreneurs would like to plug into for propelling growth?
The discussions brought to light the issues that the young yet promising legal tech industry has faced to scale up the business.
Komal Gupta rightly highlighted that as a founder, you have to believe in the idea that you pitch to your clients. There is no scarcity of talent, but definitely of direction, and the easiest way to solve this is going to the ground and listening to what your clients say.
Unless we have our ears on what the customers are saying, there is no way to comprehend their problems. And if you cannot do that, there can be no progress.
– Pulkit Anand
Pulkit also emphasized that when working in the legal tech business, we cannot treat lawyers as usual business, even a single lawyer's chamber functions as a business. For achieving something that your customers want or demand from you, you need to keep taking small steps towards bigger goals. Creating solution-based products will only become a reality if you successfully identify the problem areas for your clients.
Namita Shah also elaborated her experiences on the point of "Product-Market Fit." According to her finding a solution to solve a problem better than current is one side of the coin. The other includes how well does that solution fits in your client's ecosystem.
The current legal tech industry is evolving at a fantastic pace. But it does have a set of unique challenges. Pulkit pointed out 2 particular challenges that are very native to the combination of law, justice, and technology:
- Text- the legal industry is filled with text. Be it contracts, judgment, or any other documents; legal does not function without text. Building software that can comprehend the language and give intelligent outcomes to help speed up a lawyer's work is a challenge.
- Access to data - is one more challenge that is specific to this industry.
Namita also added to this, pointing out the legal industry's initial resistance to technology, which proves as a significant hurdle to legal tech.
Komal gave her insights stressing the inconsistency in writing of the Indian judiciary. The contracts, judgments, or other legal documents do not follow a standard format or language. This makes building software more challenging. If there is uniformity in the legal writings, applying machine learning and artificial intelligence will surely yield fantastic results.
Key Takeaways:
- Pay close attention to the wants and demands of your customers before you build on a solution.
- Identify the challenges that are specific to the industry you want to work in.
- Data analytics will yield fantastic results if the legal writings follow a form of standardization.
