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disruptthelaw

113 karma · joined April 21, 2021

CONTINUED FROM https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26887408

...Lawyers can self-publish legal opinions, templates, checklists etc. They are prompted to tag the content by jurisdiction, category etc and to cite related case law and legislation. We organise the legal info in ways that make it really useful for readers, with advanced filtering, search, recommendations, and cross referencing. We become the Google for legal info.

The majority of content is free to consume and we monetize by granting paid publishers extra prominence, reporting, and lead gen tools. But we can then also add an editorial layer to curate, procure, and review selected content. This editorial layer creates certain content that is more authoritative and credible. You can charge for this layer of content which allows you capture market share from the entrenched legal publishers.

Path to market? we start by tackling a narrow horizontal, ie one area of law (fundamentals of doing business in various countries) as a starting point.

Its a manual process of reaching out to content producers and law firms and gradually getting them to load content. For a year or 2 you struggle but at some point you have enough good content to attract high volume of readers organically and then content producers naturally want to load content.

ABOUT ME

In my late thirties. I'm using a throwaway account so that my company does not find out. But I will disclose all info in full in private.

I'm deeply embedded in this space and I've seen all of the above use cases first hand. After qualifying as a lawyer I founded a legal info site that caters for use cases a, b and c (for a certain country, not global). This website attracts close to 100k unique readers a month a hundreds of high quality leads for the lawyers that write on the website (use case C)

I've since sold that platform and now work at large multinational legal publisher. Unfortunately my company is too large and dysfunctional to really deliver on the full capability of this product. They also do not understand how the 4 use-cases above fit together and they dont have an efficient model to pull this strands together and deliver on them in a sustainable way. My frustration leads me to wanting to go independent.

I'm a generalist and very resourceful. I know quite a bit about tech, SEO, UX, product management principles, and the legal market.

WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR

I need a team to help build the product and I need finance. So it could mean taking on a CTO, or it could be someone with access to seed finance and who can help me hire a dev lead, or a combination thereof.

In order to leave my job and devote myself full time I need a starting salary of around 70k$ per year.

Ideally I would like cofounders who understand how to get finance and who can build the right kind of network. I primarily want to focus on the product. growth and revenue model as much as reasonably possible.

Ideally my cofounders are well suited for this space and are in it for the long haul.

submissionscomments
disruptthelaw··on 43% of South African youths are not in employment, education or training
Every day millions of South Africans walk in the street and don’t die. The touristy areas are safer than elsewhere. There isn’t just random non stop killing in the streets.
disruptthelaw··on 43% of South African youths are not in employment, education or training
$350 per month full time (albeit with accommodation sometimes included). Surely this would be unheard of in the US?
disruptthelaw
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·on 43% of South African youths are not in employment, education or training
Yes I don’t think anyone here disputes the historical cause.
disruptthelaw··on 43% of South African youths are not in employment, education or training
Yeah, I think what makes SA different is most people in the middle class economy can afford domestic staff.
disruptthelaw··on 43% of South African youths are not in employment, education or training
The surplus of unskilled workers means that labor is very cheap. Businesses over employ (cleaning staff, security etc), and even homes over employ in terms of domestic staff (maids and garderners), but there’s still a big surplus.
disruptthelaw··on 43% of South African youths are not in employment, education or training
There is a shortage of skilled workers and there is a surplus of unskilled workers. Google “skill shortage South Africa” or something like that for more info. I don’t think there is an easy solution to bringing that gap, but I’m sure getting the basics right (ie a decent education system) would help a lot.
disruptthelaw··on 43% of South African youths are not in employment, education or training
In addition to the other answers here, there is a large informal economy that essentially caters for the poor. This both provides them with informal means of income but also allows the poor to access essentials cheaply. For example a typical middle class corporate worker may earn a salary and live a lifestyle that is comparable to European counterpart. This same person may employ a full time housekeeper for $350 a month and this housekeeper somehow gets by because she exists in a parallel economy of sorts.
disruptthelaw··on What would a Deadmanswitch service need to do for you to trust it?
I think you’re mostly addressing issues of user experience. Let me put it this way, just for sake of simplicity, assume all the system did was keep a set of instructions to be read by your loved ones upon your death. The instructions could be to contact your lawyer for a copy of your will, or to delete your porn hard drive, or to deliver a letter to your child etc. Forgot about estate law and those complications. Forgot whether you think there is a need for this service. Assume that you do. What matters for my purpose is that you need to trust this service to keep your info for longer than you will live, and to make that info available to the people you specified when you die. What would make you trust this system with these all important instructions? How could this company set itself up that will make it certain to deliver its promise?
disruptthelaw··on What would a Deadmanswitch service need to do for you to trust it?
Great feedback thank you.

Personally, purely from a user experience point of view, I’d rather have an online portal where I can manage my info than have to go through a law firm each time I want to update anything. As such I feel there is a business case here IF the trust issue could be resolved.

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