Finding legal help for accounts, branding and other legal issues has always been a tough task for entrepreneurs while founding a startup. To overcome this pain point and help the entrepreneurs getting a hassle-free legal experience, EasyLaw was founded by Ridhish Talwar and Dhruv Jain. Based in Delhi, the startup provides pan-India service to connect clients with the experts located near them.
Founded in 2011, EasyLaw remained as a service provider for the first two years of its launch. But at the beginning of 2013, it moved from a service provider to a market place. The platform now has 275 experts with completed profiles comprising a good mix of lawyers, company secretaries, chartered accountants, cost accountants, tax consultants and other professionals. Encouragingly, many are regularly active on the platform with around 30% having contributed content.
“Most parts of 2013 was spent on conceiving and developing the EasyLaw 2.0 model. In December 2013, the new business model has gone live in a public beta phase”, says Ridhish, Co-Founder of EasyLaw.
EasyLaw is a platform for assisting clients to connect with the relevant legal experts located near them. It has implemented the location-based search algorithm in its revamped 2.0 version to give the clients the best possible legal advice in their locality. The algorithm detects the user’s location automatically and presents them with the best professionals available nearby. The experts are ranked by their previous projects undertaken and feedback from the clients.
After the 2.0 revamp, EasyLaw has become a marketplace for services. Clients can either post legal questions to get free answers or post Projects to get quotations for the work they need to be done.
EasyLaw doesn’t charge anything to the clients, all transactions between the clients and experts and done without EasyLaw getting involved. It only assists in connecting the clients for free. The feedback enabled projects are also a revenue source for EasyLaw. It charges each client who uses the feedback model Rs 99.
“The reason we are charging for feedback enabled projects is that the RBI prohibits a PayPal type of escrow service for INR settlements. Due to this, we were forced to let clients and experts, pay and receive payments off-platform,” says Dhruv.
Experts build their profile and skill by contributing content such as posting answers in the discussion board, writing articles and uploading documents. This enables clients to more comprehensively judge the suitability of experts to their particular needs while ensuring the practicality of engagement.
Both of the co-founders come from an entrepreneurial background and have experience with startups before founding EasyLaw. Both Dhruv and Risdhish have worked in the financial service industry in London. Prior to co-founding EasyLaw, Ridhish started his entrepreneurial career by founding a gaming brand “The Shark”.
