In Spotlight: Legistify
Seamless work management for Enterprise legal
The start of the journey
Akshat Singhal started his first company in his second year at Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. The company couldn’t scale due to debt-recovery problems, leading to Akshat spending a lot of time with lawyers. ‘Finding the right lawyer is hard’, Akshat realised.
Most companies in India with reach across the country are susceptible to litigation. Consumer cases, cases of fraud by employees, disputes with partners, recovery cases, arbitrations - the types are numerous, and so are the various local courts and tribunals across a multitude of states in India. For a company with a small legal team sitting at the headquarters, it means managing each and every local litigation somehow. The challenges include but are not limited to finding the right hyper-local lawyer for the right jurisdiction and managing the entire litigation process. Managing the litigation workflow is a challenging process taking up much of an in-house lawyer’s time, from documentation to invoicing to the appointment of a lawyer to keeping track of the progress.
On identifying the key problem
“There’s a lot of challenges that a typical, normal Indian user essentially faces. Most importantly there’s a lack of trust - this is what our reading of the market is. I mean, even today, I have like thousands of lawyers registered on the platform but if I get into some sort of a legal trouble, I will think ten times before actually making a decision. Because I don’t have the required data set, I don’t have the required knowledge, I will have to rely on someone else’s local lawyer or family lawyer. We identify that as a huge problem. We want to really help these users.”*
This is where Legistify steps in. What started as one of India’s first DIY agreement platforms, Legistify, enables companies to find the right lawyer. This could mean a variety of criteria, the right jurisdiction for hyperlocal lawyers or the right subject matter, or the right experience or cost.
Legistify partners with lawyers all over India to help companies connect with the right lawyer at the right price. On the one hand, it is an economic proposition for companies and on the other, it acts as a platform for client exposure for many partner lawyers who are first-generation lawyers.
Legistify is also working towards templatisation and providing better technological solutions for partner lawyers. With the one-stop solution provision, Legistify has grown to have more than two hundred and fifty enterprise customers and more than seven thousand lawyers on board, managing more than ten lakh cases via the platform. All of this has generated more than twenty crores in revenue for the lawyers on the platform.
A complete litigation solution
Legistify has matured since then through its learning and has now pivoted towards being a litigation-management platform for companies. Along with choosing the right lawyer, Legistify provides the workflow solution for a company to manage its litigation seamlessly.
As Akshat explains, every team in a company, such as sales or marketing, have their own workflow management product. Legistify caters to in-house legal teams by providing such workflow solutions. This is not limited to litigation. Their tech platform provides workflow support for the management of the companies’ intellectual properties, as well as the management of contracts.
Technology has become one of the critical game-changers in Legistify’s journey. It has taken the litigation process from updating individual cases through tedious processes, such as talking to the individual lawyer or looking at websites, to the platform providing the solution for such management. Legistify’s endeavour continues to be having the platform simplify processes for both the enterprises and the lawyers enrolled on their platform. To this end, Legistify is using the network and generated data to make better connections and provide more and more micro-level solutions, significantly transforming the legal experience for enterprises.
Note:
*Akshat Singhal, co-founder of Legistify, in conversation with Ritvik Lukose during Agami Prize 2022.
Edited by Jahnavi Jayanth, Keerthana Medarametla and Supriya Sankaran.
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