Founded in September 2015 by Rishabh Gupta and Kushal Bhagat,
MyAdvo acts as a legal concierge. By providing in-depth lawyer profiling - with their areas of practice, client reviews, education, consultation charges & other dynamic variables - which are updated constantly using its algorithm, the startup helps users find the lawyers matching their requirement, and book a consultation through the MyAdvo platform.
GenesisRishabh’s family faced a grave legal situation, and the case proceedings stretched for more than 8 years. During the case he experienced firsthand, the problems faced by many more like him. Not only is it difficult to find a lawyer experienced in your type of case, following up during case proceedings can be a nightmare & there is no fee transparency. That is where the idea of building a service that helps people through the legal journey was born. One day, over a discussion with Kushal - who had also faced similar legal hassles in his business & personal life – Rishabh found out that Kushal too was passionate about the idea and already started researching on it. That is how the founders came together to start MyAdvo.
Sujata Sangwan Interacts With Rishabh Gupta, Co-founder, MyAdvo And Spoke To Him
Differentiation Factors and Unique Key FeaturesWe differentiate ourselves by providing superior lawyer profiling which saves a ton of time, effort and money for our users.
MyAdvo Team ensures and delivers prompt and efficient level of supports around the clock through various mediums, such as, live web assistance chat, in-person assistance, we also provide an online platform where they could get expertise information about different categories of legal matters, Q&A’s Forum, Legal Helpline Number - +91 124 4060860 (functional from 10:00 am- 10:00 pm) and email assistance round the clock.
We also ensure on-going case quotations where the client can reach us to get second opinion for their ongoing cases if they feel like being cheated or getting high quotation from their already hired lawyers. Our team asks them to send their documents copy. We provide them basic information such as case quotation, case study and if needed then consultancy at minimal cost they can bear. We have a robust lawyer rating system in place - client feedback, lawyer’s interaction & contribution on the MyAdvo Platform & offline data – providing robustness and superior search results for the user.
Funding & MonetizationThe startup is bootstrapped so far but currently looking to raise funds. We charge the lawyers a monthly/quarterly subscription for engaging with the platform.
Traction Details We have generated around 40L in fees for lawyers and law firms, serviced over 3500+ client queries and engaged and dealt with 1000+ lawyers, 45% of the genuine legal queries that we have received have ended up in engaging a lawyer using Myadvo.
Future Plans We already have a 1,000+ lawyer network spread across 70 cities. In the next 6 months – 5,000 lawyers will be part of the network, and we’ll be serving over 20,000 legal queries a month, with strong presence in 8 cities. Within the next one year, we would be rolling out mobile applications for case support & management for lawyers and upgrade our current matching technology, with a network of more than 15,000 lawyers using our platform, serving over 50,000 legal queries a month.
We will also soon be launching –AdvoDigi. It will be an App based solution – acting as a virtual office for the lawyer. Lawyers will be able to manage their cases, update their clients, stay appraised about legal news & judgements and expand their lawyer network through a single Application.
Marketing Plans Currently, at such an initial stage we are targeting areas where there is a need for legal assistance and people are clueless about how to go about it. Or are finding it very difficult to manage their legal problems (in case of corporate) across as they need one point of contact reporting to them which is difficult as the lawyers they deal with are scattered all over. For example, we came across cases where when the time for giving possession of houses to the buyers came, the builders or real estate firms would delay the process and continue charging for the time period or fudge expenses and end up harassing the customer in return. We helped in bringing together the complainants and file the cases together as greater numbers have higher impact.
Challenges Faced As a startup, we were obviously facing a cash crunch. We have faced the usual teething problems that any startup faces – office rental, employee salary etc. But those are hurdles we expected.
Moving on, the biggest challenge was ideating and implementing effective strategies to convince the general public as well as the lawyers to join/sign up MyAdvo. We used to visit district courts, the Delhi High Court at 9 in the morning and engage with people who were there looking for lawyers or some kind of legal guidance. In fact we got our first two clients from these visits.
Another challenge was convincing people to move online (that you can go and look for a lawyer by signing up on a website and he/she will be a verified professional and expert in your case) as lawyers are something that people rely on word-of-mouth. The idea that you need a specialist for your case as opposed to anyone willing to do it was a tough one to crack and we believe that if this catches on nationally and as a practice, we are looking to disrupt the functioning of the legal industry as we know it. Simultaneously, convincing lawyers to come aboard was a parallel hurdle we were fighting, as the legal industry has been unchanged for the past 50 years and has become quite opaque. But we are hopeful of the future and believe continuous efforts and a focused approach can really bring about major and visible difference.
Market Size & Opportunity This is a $10bn industry. 50 million individuals and corporate ventures need to engage with a lawyer annually.
