QanoonOnline is a Lahore-based legal startup that aims to be a one-stop shop for all your legal needs. So if you are in a legal quagmire and don’t know where to find your Saul Goodman, they have you covered. With the help of this online portal, you can filter results by legal scope, city, gender and choose a legal practitioner from the provided list based on user ratings (not shown).

But that’s not all. They also have an in-house legal consultancy offering corporate advice to small and medium enterprises as well as startups. Anything from company registration to applying for national tax number and filing for a patent, these guys claim to do it.

In addition to that, QanoonOnline also offers a case management system to practitioners and law firms to digitise their practice, appointments and notes as well as record the case’s life cycle — basically do everything the good, old lawyer diaries used to.

But the company seems to be juggling between the old and the new: creating an online marketplace while at the same time offering old-school legal consultancy. The latter doesn’t sound too scalable, especially for a startup that hopes to be the go-to portal for all your legal troubles. “The in-house consultancy thing is not supposed to be our core business; we don’t plan to become another law firm. That is the market we hope to capture and scale through automation,” chief executive officer Safiullah explains.

Automated legal aid? What does that even mean? Some hi-fi artificial intelligence (AI) software that provides you consultancy? Even to my surprise, yes. “I am currently working on an AI software to automate our advisory services,” chief technology officer Shahid Malik points out.

That’s quite ambitious and requires a longer time horizon. However, at the moment, even their website isn’t the most appealing one in terms of the user interface. How, then, can a startup with tech at its heart distinguish itself from traditional players in the industry? Both c-suiters are mindful of this fact, “we are currently working to revamp our website and improve its design. It should take another two weeks to deploy the updated version,” Shahid tells Dawn.

The idea was conceived when Safiullah, a lawyer by profession, ran into a property feud and realised the need for an expansive legal portal. The startup was quickly incubated at the National Incubation Centre, Lahore and was launched in early 2017.

How do they make money? Like any other online marketplace, they charge a certain commission on each consultation. As for advisory services, the QanoonOnline team charges fee for each case and for the case management system, there is an initial charge plus the annual subscription. All these income streams have enabled the bootstrapped startup to break even but they are actively looking for investors who can help them scale further.

Within the legal-tech startup arena, QanoonOnline’s main competitor is a Karachi-based web portal Wukla, which started operations in 2015. How does Safiullah then plan to make his way through against competition that has the first mover advantage? “Wukla’s main focus is on creating contracts through their website but they haven’t penetrated the online marketplace aspect of the business. On the other hand, that’s our main value proposition,” says the CEO.

Other than that, a huge chunk of the legal market in Pakistan is catered by black-suited lawyers (or touts, as they are often called) sitting on their moth-eaten desks in the court premises or outside government buildings. And compared to QanoonOnline’s bookings and ratings-based system, these practitioners can be consulted almost instantly, are cheaper and most importantly, they know the nitty-gritty of the nepotistic public office culture.

“The demand for these guys exists because people don’t know where to look for a lawyer. And that’s exactly what we offer. A place to find a credible lawyer based on user ratings coupled with the necessary knowledge on the consultant. Once that information asymmetry is solved, we hope to capture the touts’ market,” Safiullah claims.

Another challenge they face is when users, after initiating contact with their lawyer through QanoonOnline’s portal, decide to cut out the middlemen. “We are trying to incentivise our practitioners to continue consulting users through our portal by offering them more attractive bonus structures based on loyalty,” Safiullah says.

So far, Safiullah and co has mostly remained limited to their personal network to list lawyers on their portal with the almost entire focus on Lahore. They have minimal presence in Karachi and Islamabad. The CEO claims to have around 200 lawyers all in all with website hits exceeding 5,000 a month.

The potential gains are uncapped but the extent to which QanoonOnline is able to scale is only up to Safiullah and his men.

The writer is member of staff:

m.mutaherkhan@gmail.com

Twitter: @MutaherKhan

Published in Dawn, August 26th, 2018