Why a BITS Pilani grad and corporate lawyer teamed up to launch a legal tech startup

At BITS Pilani, Akshat Singhal, a student of Masters in Physics, wanted to set up a company. However, as a first-time entrepreneur, he realised he needs to sort through a whole set of legal aspects.

“This can be very unnerving for anyone, especially for startup founders who are anyway grappling with numerous issues of starting a venture. They are stretching resources for something that does not contribute towards business growth but is essential,” Akshat tells YourStory. 

Startup founders need the right set of knowledge of legal frameworks, rights definition etc., from the beginning to avoid any future issues while running a company. 

After his previous stint failed, he teamed up with lawyer and colleague Pratik Mahapatra to start Legistify in 2017. 

The Delhi-NCR-based tech-enabled legal concierge platform works with mid-market and large companies to provide an enterprise litigation management (ELM) suite called LegisTrak.

Legistify — which covers all aspects of litigation, intellectual property, legal notices, and legal contracts management — provides on-demand access to over 10,000 pre-verified lawyers pan-India. 

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The initial footwork 

In the early days, Akshat would go to local courts in Delhi-NCR and talk to lawyers and others to find the gaps in business-related legal work. During the time, he met Pratik, an M&A lawyer, and both decided to startup together — create a network of lawyers and technology. 

While Akshat focused on building technical and business prowess, Pratik brought in domain experts related to legal, finance, etc. Today, Legistify is a 50 people team.

“We also offer real-time data-backed insights on externally engaged lawyers, alongside predictions on possible litigation outcomes using over 200 million historic case data from more than 7,000 Indian courts,” Akshat adds. 

With a network spanning across 300 cities, Legistify has more than 100 corporates as clients, including SBI General Insurance, Amazon, Snapdeal, Whirlpool, Indiamart, Panasonic, Havells, Max Insurance, JCB, Dell, etc.

“As we dove deeper into the market, we understood the workings of the existing system (excel sheets, manpower, etc.), which defined the problem we were trying to solve using technology. Today, we see some of the biggest enterprises happily take our solutions. We believe Legistify has brought efficiency to their system (better ROI, reduced man-hours spent, faster resolutions, etc.),” says Akshat. 

Moreover, Legistify helped several companies tackle their legal portfolio amidst the COVID 19 pandemic. 

What does the platform do?

Legistify’s platform, LegisTrak, a cloud-based legal ERP solution, is designed to make the working of in-house counsels and legal teams way more efficient. 

Entirely developed in-house, Legistify’s flagship product tracks and manages litigation in one place, provides real-time coverage in over 7,000 courts and provides case alerts, reminders, and early trackers to the users.

Moreover, it provides detailed and customisable MIS for users, legal notices and document storage management, and detailed lawyer profiling and lawyer suggestion (internal) engine, using AI on over 15 performance parameters. 

The legaltech startup has two revenue streams. First, a pay per usage SaaS model, which offers freedom and flexibility to users. It also encourages product sampling, resulting in the company retaining clients, who also take up Legistify’s ELM solutions.

Second, Legistify provides a high level of flexibility to its clients. It offers managed legal services to high usage clients customised as per their individual needs. It also allows scalability, enabling them to pay as per their use (per case handled). 

The end-to-end market network for corporate legal solutions undertakes thorough due diligence before onboarding a lawyer. Based on various parameters, including success rate, pendency, etc., it ranks each of its empanelled lawyers. Moreover, categorisation based on areas of expertise further aids a user to select objectively. 

“On the product front, we have developed the workflow automation part, lawyer ML insights, and are now building a case outcome prediction engine which would help us close the loop and enhance our future pipeline,” the co-founder says. 

He adds, “One of our key operational metrics is the number of cases handled and tracked by our system. And, I am happy to say this has grown significantly from 25,000 cases to 1,25,000+ cases in the past six months. Our clients nearly trebled from 35 to 100+ during this period.” 

Market and future 

In recent years, India has seen a rise in legaltech startups, which includes Lawyered, PracticeLegal, LawRato, Presolve360, Legal kart, Ipleaders, Lawyer24x, SoOLEGAL, Legal Salah, and MikeLegal, among others.

Akshat adds Legistify’s USP lies in disrupting excessive weightage given to trust and human intuition for critical legal decisions and supplementing human judgment with effective technology solutions backed by efficient data management, analysis, and AI. 

“We are also working towards transforming Legistify from a services provider to a product-led company, and LegisTrak is a strong step in this direction. Legistify team is developing highly effective and disruptive products that will prove to be game-changers and industry benchmarks,” he says. 

Some of Legistify's new products include litigation prediction using trends from over 100 million historical cases, contract lifecycle management — from creation, key clause review, signing, etc., and a lawyer interface tool to connect for demand and supply.