CreativeLawyer

CreativeLawyer (CL) is an IT Enabled Legal Service Platform where customers can get legal aid through various product features starting from automated generation of legal documents intuitively, asking a question to lawyer, online chatting or video discussion with lawyer, raising a service request to a lawyer, reading legal blogs etc. Our mission is to make CL is #1 online legal information & aid portal for all over Bangladesh.

Our main intention is to either solve the existing problem or bring efficiency in the existing legal service value chain. We’re going to address following major problems within our ITES platform: i) Having Significant Risk doing contract without proper understanding ii) Less tendency of knowing legal status in advance iii) Unknown legal service Price iv) Less legal Knowledge v) Missing of Legal expert Online Image vi) Challenge getting appropriate legal services in rural area.

Having Significant Risk doing contract: Many Small & Medium enterprise companies & individuals generally don’t have permanent legal consultants. They either hire legal experts or search contract in internet or rely on other party offered contract. The SME companies or individuals who are searching in internet & rely fully on other party given contract might carry significant risk factors in legal engagement.

Less tendency of knowing legal status in advance: The tendency of a significant number of people is to hire or contact a lawyer only when he/she is in real need due to unknown legal service price & nature. In many cases there are requirements where an individual or entity shall check their legal status ahead of the actual need.

Unknown legal service Price: In existing legal service process, pricing or fees are not fixed or known in advance for any legal service. People have confusions before visiting to a lawyer mainly on the fees.

Less legal Knowledge: Less digital content on legal matter in Bangladesh specially in Bengali & hence people cannot learn on their self-face much.

Missing of Legal expert Online Image: Lack of online image for a legal expert in a specific field in Bangladesh. 

Challenge getting appropriate legal services in rural area

Our customers fall mainly into two categories starting from Small & Medium enterprise companies as well as individuals located both city & rural area. There're different types of legal services which are planned to cover e.g. Civil, Family, Company, Income Tax, Immigration etc. As it is an technology enabled solution, we also think about our rural area people use cases to be brought under our coverage by having our distribution or partnership model with our rural area lawyers. Within our solutions, we have different product features addressing present problem or adding values of the existing legal services. 

1. Automated Document Generation: CreativeLawyer has a cost effective automated intuitive legal document generation feature which can mitigate critical & common risk from Bangladeshi Law perspective specially.

2. Single Tap on App to Check Legal Status pro-actively: CL has features which will give people to keep in touch with lawyer through an online platform (Video, Chat, On-Call) with reduced cost from anytime anywhere.

3. Know your Service Price before your visit to lawyer

4. Creating Awareness through Online Information using blog & free ask a lawyer feature

5. Know your lawyer rating & a panel for advertisement

6. Legal Document Review Service 

We planned to have following product features within a web-based solution. The MVP marked features is ready to lunch as pilot basis by next September 2019. 

Ask a Lawyer (MVP) 
Legal Blog (MVP) 
Automated Document Generation (MVP) 
Legal Service Support Request (MVP) 
Legal Service Support through online Chatting Legal Lawyer Advertisement Corporate Subscription (MVP) 
Legal Benefits in work place Creative Lawyer in Bengali  Live Video Session with Lawyer (Pre-Scheduled) 
Legal Document Review Service

There will be following separate panel within our web-based solution: 

Customer Portal 
Legal Partner Portal 
Billing Manager Portal
Administration Portal
Distributor Portal

In terms of technology, we are touching:

Document Mediation Layer - Comand line Java Tool (with GUI planned) 
Data Base Layer - Maria DB 
Middleware/API Back End - PHP Laravel Framework (REST FULL Interface planned) 
Web UI - HTML/CSS, JS (REACT JS, HTML/CSS planned) 
Infrastructure - AWS Cloud/Cent OS 
Third party integration: Payment GW – SSLCOMMERZ, Video conference – Zoom (Planned) Language Support: English, Bengali (Planned)

Process: In each product features, we will have our legal partners ensuring the customer service quality and finally Application Administration will be there to monitor all the activities, customer experience and billing matter. So, we do have services which our customer can directly avail by just signing up free of cost and pay us as per his/her service consumption. There are other types of services which are connecting our legal partners using our solution e.g. taking a legal support for opening a limited company. In case of rural area where customers are not having digital equipment, they can directly go to our distribution office for getting our legal services. In background, we will be sharing revenue with our partners as well as distributors. 

The innovative strength resides within our technical solution as well as our business model to ensure different customer segment value proposition and in parallel increasing benefits for our partners. Coming to our solution, we already developed a robust software framework to configure any types of legal document using a GUI based panel & that can be extended for any countries or language very easily. It has been tested with multiple complex documentation configuration used both in Bangladesh and Australia. Our legal partners are empowered to configure the legal documents they need in day to day job within our system by themselves with minor admin support with no coding involvement. This will ensure our customer to get legal documentation service in a very cost-effective manner while ensuring common risks are mitigated. Coming to our business model, we will be connecting our partners to enrich their revenue conveniently with no extra cost to them. In addition, we can support even to rural area’s people through our distribution & partner network which will be unique approach in our knowledge. In addition, enriching legal information online for Bangladesh would be helpful people to understand law and it would increase better awareness in society in terms of legal matter.  At last, customer can gradually see lawyer images online rated by individuals or their activities in online to have a perception about a reputed lawyer before to contact.

The idea came to our mind from doing a real software procurement consultancy for a hospital. Then idealisation to till today, we have developed a robust framework and that framework has been tested with many Bangladeshi and Australian legal document configuration from the application itself.  In middle of our journey, we do at least 50 people survey verbally about our solution feasibility including our legal partners and the outcome is positive in 90% cases. Moreover we do receive some important feedback from the customer survey & reshaped our business plan accordingly. For example, many people needs to write General Diary (GD) to police station for many reasons in day to day life. We do see a significant challenge writing a simple starting from an educated to an illiterate people. CL can give an automated GD generation interface by just answering some simple questions and finally customer can get the formatted GD downloaded. This is a simple use case which we are planning to provide our customer free of cost. In our MVP it would be in English and in a quarter road map it would be implemented in Bengali as well. In case of even rural area people who don't have technology access can get or avail CL services from our distribution channel. In addition, gradually it would be a platform of digital legal content in Bangladesh where any community can get benefits by following simple steps.

As we are preparing to lunch by September 2019, the current number of people we're serving is zero.

The number we’ll be serving in first year is around 9,000 

The number we’ll be serving within next five year is around 125,000

In high level, we have business, technology and financial plan from the day one deployment to next one year and half plan. This will ensure completing all the product features live and setting gradually a strong platform supporting next five years of scale-ability.

Currently we're preparing for our minimum viable product lunch by September 2019 in pilot basis with following product features:

F1 Ask a Lawyer 
F2 Legal Blog 
F3 Automated Document Generation (<=25 Legal Documents) 
F4 Legal Service Support Request (Only in Dhaka and Chittagong City Area) 
F7 Corporate Subscription

After having the initial lunch, we have planned to roll-out or add following product features in CL within next nine months and enlarge the scope of Legal Service Support regional area to all city corporations/districts and adding more documents for automated document generation mostly. If we decouple the planned drop wise strategy is:

Drop-2:

F5 Legal Service Support through online Chatting 
F6 Legal Lawyer Advertisement 
F9 Creative Lawyer in Bengali (Partially - Blog, Automated Document Generation) 
F11 Legal Document Review Service

Drop-3:

F10 Live Video Session with Lawyer (Pre-Scheduled) 
F9 Creative Lawyer in Bengali (Full App) 
F8 Legal Benefits in work place

Post drop-3 includes to revamp our CL platform robust so that we can build and adapt sufficient user load, adding distribution network and maintain customer experience in our application.

Within next five years road map, we will be having all 490+ police station area covered gradually with strong partner & distribution network so that all rural area people also can connect into our CL network. 

Challenges forecasting within very first years:

Financial: We would be needing financial support for rolling out CL in planned areas according to our business plan & enhance the product features.

Technology: There are improvement areas of our current solution which is built to be more saleable.

Legal: With online legal support what we can do or what we can't do limits our business domains.

Green market: Entering green market is an opportunity and it has opportunity cost. So we might need to invest more to get people used to our innovation in Bangladesh.  

Partnering: In Bangladesh, on-boarding quality partner would be challenging mostly in initial days. Even after on-boarding, there is a challenge to keep good customer experience intact. Our customer may directly contact with our partner bypassing CL in some services cases from the second time & this can be a business challenge.

Distribution: No one in rural or city area won't setup a separate setup only to do business with us in initial days.

Challenges forecasting within five years:

Customer Experience: Retaining customer and ensuring their service & Application experience would be challenging. 

Partner Experience: Meeting partner expectation in terms of pricing and service quality would be challenging with our legal partners. 

Distributor Experience: How our customer is getting services from distribution would be challenging?

Competition: There might be competition which can impact overall business plan.

There will be always challenge and risks & we learned walking on similar path since last two years. Facing challenge and overcoming that is a habit now. We've planned to tackle our major challenges and risk in following ways:

Financial: As part of our mitigation plan, we're applying here for funding as well as other potential areas. However, we decided to go to market a pilot application & deployment within our own financial capacity.

Legal: We will be putting a clause within our T&C that CL is an online legal service platform partnered with our lawyer. However, it can't be a substitute of appointing a legal lawyer in many cases. In addition, we are planed to follow direction from Bangladesh bar council. 

Partnering: Initially, we planned to keep as minimal revenue percentage for us by sharing mostly to partner to mitigate the challenge as well as declaring incentives for better & good number customer served. 

Distribution: We can start giving distributions who has already a small shop (including a PC/Laptop, head phone, speaker). Then we will support them by providing required training.

Customer Experience: Customer experience excellence is the key for any technology enabled service business model. We have our multiple communication channels so that our customer can reach to us with their feedback, complain & request and we shall provide our upmost priority to look into.

Competition: In our view, our business model and strategy & our robust software framework would give a competitive advantage over our competitions.

We're now total 22 team members working for IT Enable Services. The distribution of our mates are as follows:

Full time: 10 members

Part time: 12 members

We have in-house team members who are experts in core roles of the solution starting from business modelling, transformation, software engineering, legal matters and business development. With a small funding it would be possible to on-board required marketing and sells people who can drive according to low level strategy prepared for our roll-out. On the other hand, I'm Palash Gupta, working as Lead for CL, graduated from one of the Bangladesh public engineering university named KUET in Computer Science & Engineering having good academic & research track records. I have around 14+ Years’ Experience in IT and Telecommunication industry in different roles both home ground & abroad mostly in multinational Company. In parallel, I am Big Data Practitioner & Trainer and I am TMFORUM Certified professional. Since last two years, I am leading the company and working hard to make a successful lunch of CL. 

Having passion solving people's problem in mind from the mind and working with a committed team for a dream come true, we are the best team to take it forward and scale it for all over Bangladesh. Our vision is, CL will be the number#1 legal information & service platform of Bangladesh by next one year.

In high level, we're working with multiple legal associate firms to be our legal partner for taking their order through CL. So we can share revenue with them on the legal service fees received from customer. In addition, our legal partner can help us to grow or contribute to society by supporting "Ask a Lawyer" feature and writing blog in CL. 

To be able to manage CL Chittagong operations, we're doing a contract to use CTG IT Services office (Based on Chittagong) and their resources for legal office partnering and ensuring overall customer experience. We will be paying them based on an agreed KPI based outcome. 

We will be starting distribution agreement mainly for rural area based on our business plan as well.

Requesitng you to look into following URL:

CL Business Modeling

We will be able to generate revenue out of our value proposition offered to our customer by targeting existing available legal business & creating new scope of legal service business volume. So, it is fully a service selling concept by connecting our partner and distributors towards customer. Please find all our product features and their revenue model. 

Feature Code: F1

Feature Name: Ask a Lawyer

Feature Revenue Model: Indirect

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F2

Feature Name: Legal Blog

Feature Revenue Model: Indirect

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F3

Feature Name: Automated Document Generation

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F4

Feature Name: Legal Service Support Request

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F5

Feature Name: Legal Service Support through On-demand online Chatting

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F6

Feature Name: Legal Lawyer Advertisement

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F7

Feature Name: Corporate Subscription

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F8

Feature Name: Legal Benefits in work place

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F9

Feature Name: Creative Lawyer in Bengali

Feature Revenue Model: Indirect

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F10

Feature Name: Live Video Session with Lawyer (Pre-Scheduled)

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

Feature Code: F11

Feature Name: Legal Document Review Service

Feature Revenue Model: Incremental

Stage: MVP

According to our projection, we will be reaching out break even by next three years. 

Truly We're applying for all the potential funding opportunities to see my dream come true with our committed hard work & knowledge. We feel Tiger Challenge appropriate for couple of reasons:

1. It is matching with our region which is our motherland as well as solving developing countries issues. 

2. Before our application, we reviewed the funding application process & that is highly organised. It gives us feeling of competitiveness and challenges by world leader evaluating our applications as well as it's a learning for us throughout our application submission process. 

4. The funding amount is sufficient for us to reach close to break even. 

5. One of our local leading IT company is connected to with, it makes us proud and comfortable with the journey. 

In high level, we're working with multiple legal associate firms to be our legal partner for taking their order through CL. So we can share revenue with them on the legal service fees received from customer. In addition, our legal partner can help us to grow or contribute to society by supporting "Ask a Lawyer" feature and writing blog in CL. 

To be able to manage CL Chittagong operations, we're doing a contract to use CTG IT Services office (Based on Chittagong) and their resources for legal office partnering and ensuring overall customer experience. We will be paying them based on an agreed KPI based outcome. 

We will be starting distribution agreement mainly for rural area based on our business plan as well.