Kushal & Rishabh are the founders of MyAdvo. We started the company in September 2015, we are a good friends turned partners – having known each other for more than a decade. We both graduated from IIT Roorkee. Kushal is a CFA holder and worked with Edupristine and Beacon PE fund before founding MyAdvo. Rishabh completed his MBA from MDI, Gurgaon and worked with Goldman Sachs & EY before founding MyAdvo.
How did you discover MyAdvo?
My family faced a grave legal situation, and the case proceedings stretched for more than 8 years. During the case I experienced first hand, the problems faced by many more like me. 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. we decided to take the plunge. A few weeks later, after market research & building a business plan, MyAdvo was born.
Introduce your Co-Founder/Founders and Team.
As i stated above, Kushal & I founded the company. We build our core team through our networks – choosing people who believed in the vision of the company & had leadership skills. Currently, we are a team of 12 – spread across Sales, Tech, Operations, Marketing & Legal – all with experience in start-ups & marquee companies.
Team:
Rishabh Gupta (Founder, 29) – IIT Roorkee, MDI Alum, with work-ex in Goldman Sachs & EY
Kushal Bhagat (Founder, 29) – IIT Roorkee, CFA, with experience in Edupristine (Accel funded startup) & Beacon (PE Fund)
Harshal Gupta (26) – Leads BD & PR – work ex in American Express
Sahil Grover (26) – Leads Sales, ZO Rooms
Saurabh Dalal (24) – Marketing, DCE
Ujjwal Agarwal (23) – Leads Operations – Thapar,
Neeraj Dwevedi (23) – Full stack developer, Thapar, with work-ex in Zomato
Vasundhara Shankar (24) – Head, Case Manager.
Tell us more about your company MyAdvo, what makes you special from others?
There are over 50m individuals & corporates that need to engage a lawyer every year and yet there is no platform that provides curated & relevant information on lawyers – which helps users (1) find & engage a lawyer, (2) helps manage their case. Having faced similar problems in their respective lives, Rishabh & Kushal, IIT Roorkee batch mates came together to form MyAdvo.
Quite simply, MyAdvo is a Legal Concierge service that connects clients to the ‘right’ lawyers matching their requirements & budget.
By providing in-depth lawyer profiling – with their areas of practice, client reviews, education, consultation charges & other dynamic variables – which are updated constantly using our algorithm, we help users find the lawyers matching their requirement, and book a consultation through the MyAdvo platform.
Additionally we provide support to our clients during their case, by assigning them a case manager – who follows-up with the lawyer, helps in filing documents & keeps the client updated on the case progress.
Challenges faced by MyAdvo
Challenges: coming from a technology background, initially it was a challenge to convince lawyers, because the legal industry is a very close knit community with very few outsiders working in the domain. For the first few weeks, we walked in to lawyers’ chambers in Saket Court, Tiz Hazari Court & Patiala House Court; convincing them of the value add that we could bring; that is how we got the first 50 lawyers to register on the platform. Later, we used sms campaigns, a lot of cold calling & email campaigns to get lawyers on board.
Getting our first few clients was equally challenging. In the January chill, we distributed pamphlets outside Saket court and carried a tablet in our hands; asking people to take a second legal opinion by posting a question on our website. That is actually how we found our first client. A lady was fighting a divorce & child custody case and unhappy with her current lawyer. We showed her profiles of lawyers practicing in Saket court and she actually hired one of them. Through referrals, online leads on our website and direct marketing activities, we were soon generating more client queries than we could handle – which further validated the need for our services.
The next big challenge was hiring – we interviewed and pitched our idea to various people, within our network and hired people complimenting our skills – across online strategy, legal, marketing & operations – our core team was complete within a month.
Operationally, providing active case support was a challenge once we started generating client queries – which we overcame by assigning case managers, who are young lawyers themselves. Going forward, a major part of the ‘Case Manager’ role will be automated, through a ‘Case Management’ Mobile App.
Currently, we generate 80% of queries through our website, Now, with over 1,000 lawyers registered on the MyAdvo platform and over 6,000 legal queries resolved – we feel our product & services have been accepted by the market. Our depth of lawyer profiling & active client support leads to higher fulfillment – separating us from competition. Because of the breadth and depth of lawyers on our platform we’ve helped people across property issues, medical negligence, divorce, child custody, immigration, cheque bounce cases, consumer cases, legal drafting, Intellectual property disputes, fund raising for start-ups, amongst others.
Soon we’ll be coming up with applications which automate case support & helps lawyers manage their cases.
What’s the MyAdvo funding status, current status, and future plans?
We’ve helped resolve 6,000+ legal queries, generated 14 Lacs in revenues and have expanded our ‘lawyer network’ to 1,500+ lawyers spread across 70 cities – all achieved in 6 months. Clients book a legal consultation or legal service through MyAdvo with a lawyer and we retain part of the consultation fee. Lawyers pay us a subscription fee for using our products. Soon we’ll be coming up with applications which automate case support & helps lawyers manage their cases remotely. Despite the solid growth, we think we’v just scratched the surface, and there is a long way to go before the legal industry is truly disrupted through technology. In terms of our internal milestones, in the next six months, we’ll have a lawyer network of 5,000+ lawyers, serving 20,000 customers a month. Soon, we’ll also be launching DIY Document applications & case support applications for clients & lawyers.
Visit : website | Join us on our : facebook.com/MyAdvo.in