An online platform to provide answers to legal queries of “any shape and size”, LawFarm has been co-founded by NUJS graduates Monalisa Saha and Sreerupa Choudhury. In this interview with Bar & Bench, the two share their reasons for becoming entrepreneurs, how LawFarm works and what they have learnt along the way.
Bar & Bench: First BribeHackers and now LawFarm. The two of you are true-blue entrepreneurs aren’t you?
Monalisa Saha: Yeah! The concept of LawFarm was always there in rudimentary form with both of us in very different ways. For me, it was stunning that though ignorance of law is not recognized as a defence in our country, very few people were actually aware of the content of law. And during my legal education I realized that the reason is not that these non-law people were disinterested in learning about law. Most of them thought that the language in which the law is written down is rather complicated, which can’t be quite deciphered without the help of legal professionals. And, going to legal professional and paying fees without there being an actual legal problem made no sense to a lot of them. Besides who has the time to meet legal professionals in the physical world? We thought of making various kinds of legal knowledge sharing simpler and free. And to fulfill that purpose there was no other way but to be an entrepreneur, since there was no such existing system to be a part of.
Sreerupa Chowdhury: I never harbored any dreams of getting into entrepreneurship, and got into it quite accidentally. A couple of friends from outside law school approached me some time back because they wanted to do something entrepreneurial and thought I’d be a decent fit to the team. That’s how it started for me. This was the time CASE was founded. One thing led to another, and I was selected for the Dell Summer Social Innovation Lab in Boston last year. That one month at the Lab, meeting some of the most wonderful people from around the world working in the field of social entrepreneurship, gave me a sense of direction. I actually met Courtland at the Lab, whose donation helped build the LawFarm website. After coming back from the Lab, I was looking to re-build the team, and thankfully I found Monalisa. I believe a lot in destiny. Anti-corruption has always been a passion of mine and a friend from the Lab who knew about it, told me I should apply for the Global Youth Anti-Corruption Forum in Brasilia. The motivation that you get in such conferences is too tremendous for you to not do anything about your ideas. Applying to the World Justice Project Opportunity Fund was a shot in the dark, and LawFarm was still in the ideation stage back then. Around three months later, we actually won the grant and we found ourselves with two startups. It’s been crazy with the work-load ever since but we’re doing the best we can.
B&B: Sreerupa – What were the things you learnt from your time with CASE? Is LawFarm also built on a similar structure?
SC: I feel that CASE was the prologue to LawFarm. CASE was built on the idea that law students could represent cheated consumers in the consumer forums, where it is not necessary to be a lawyer to argue a case, and that these law students could learn a lot from this real life lawyering while consumers could gain through free services. Simply put, it would be a win-win situation. While CASE won accolades at business plan competitions, it ran into ground level problems at the incubation stage – problems of funding, team motivation – basically problems that most startups run into. I think LawFarm is an improvement on CASE since it goes one step further to include all kinds of problems, it is trying to build a community where sharing quality information on law is free and is trying to start a virtual pro bono movement of sorts.
B&B: So LawFarm seeks to offer legal advice through the website. How do you plan on keeping a check on the quality of advice that is tendered?
MS: We have created a LawFarm Review Team for this purpose. It is their job to check the quality of answers posted on LawFarm. If the answers do not match up to the requisite standards, the Review team shall publish its own answer after engaging in adequate research. They will also recommend the best answers on LawFarm. Their work is a bit like the editorial team of a journal. The review team actually makes LawFarm different from any other online legal portal.
We had received around 113 applications till 18th midnight and we just announced the list of selected candidates selected for the various law farm teams. There are 31 in our Review Team as of now.
SC: We’re working on developing a very transparent rating system for people who give consistently good answers on LawFarm. We’re also trying to get good lawyers in the country on our Advisory Panel. We hope that we can reach out to the legal fraternity and we urge them to join us. The hope is that quality information on the law need not always come for a price, and lawyers need not always be so hated.
B&B: Is the rest of your team working full-time on this or are you a collective of people dabbling in different things? How do you allocate responsibilities?
SC: Good question. See, LawFarm was not started with an aim to make money out of it, and therefore the question of working full time in it does not arise, at least not in this stage. Mona is doing her Masters from NUJS, and will also be working in LawFarm. She’ll be heading content and research – and therefore the Review team will be directly working with her. I am joining a company as a legal counsel. I will thus be involved in LawFarm in an advisory capacity – mainly strategizing on how to develop it further. We have a bunch of really smart people on board, some of them still students, some working professionals – and all of them are doing their bit to see LawFarm through. As of now we don’t have any investments on board, and can you really expect an IIM alumnus working full time on a venture without any pay?
As for allocating responsibilities, people get their positions based on what their core strengths are – for instance, Joydeep and Pinak, who are MBA graduates, are in the business development team; Anurag who is an out and out peoples’ person is in the HR team; Abhirup, who is found on social media all day long was put in the PR team; Shouvik, who is an amazing researcher, was a natural for the Review Team. This was the first team we started with. Along the way, people like Swarnendu and Debolina helped us grow by being really active on LawFarm. We just finished our first round of recruitments for all the teams, and hope to see some quality work from them in the near future.
B&B: Financial viability – Possible? Will you continue to look for donations or do you think the ad-revenue will be self-sufficient at some point in time?
MS & SC: We’ve put up an ‘advertise and donate’ tab on the website so we are essentially open to both. Early on, we recognized that LawFarm would not sustain itself without investments. New features are still being added to the website almost every day. Also, an interactive platform of this sort needs to keep reinventing itself. Money is needed for marketing it, and also for the day-to-day running expenses of teams. We also want to have small monetary incentives for the best answers. The business development team is in the process of building a strong business model, and we’ll be looking for investors.
B&B: You seem to have consciously reached out to law students as potential collaborators. Any particular reasons for this?
MN & SC: A techno-legal project needs legal people – and ones with more drive and time at their disposal – hence law students. We really believe in the power of the youth to effectuate change. Also, another factor we considered is that the student community spends the most amount of time online. We reached out to non-law students as well for some of our teams, but it was more difficult because most of our networks are among law students. In the near future, we plan on reaching out to the best lawyers of the country and hope to get them to join our mentorship program. The mentorship program will have law students getting mentored by lawyers in doing pro-bono work. We also want to reach out to lawyers and associates working in firms or companies to register on LawFarm and help the community grow by sharing their knowledge.
B&B:. What is your opinion of your legal education? How did you manage both studies and these ventures?
MS: Since our venture is primarily academic oriented and of course those having practical implications it doesn’t per se require me to work for these two things in a different way.
SC: Legal education gives you various skills – such as the ability to reason things logically, to communicate cogently– and this has helped me in everything I do. As for managing studies and these ventures – I was always a multi-tasker since childhood, and find myself in a state of panic if I’m not doing ten things at the same time.
B&B: Lastly, any advice for those who are thinking of starting something of their own?
MS: My suggestion to newer entrepreneurs is to always keep faith in their dreams and never let the voice of others drown their belief in themselves and work really hard to make their goals a reality.
SC: I wish there was a simple mantra but there isn’t. I would say – follow your instinct, be prepared to work very hard, build a good team and find ways to keep yourself motivated. Also something I heard recently which stuck with me – when Thomas Edison was told, “But you have failed ten thousand times in making a light-bulb”, he replied, “I have not failed. I have successfully found ten thousand ways that will not work”.