1. Inception

2. Evolution in business model

3. Expansion and growth

4. Awards and recognition

5. Funding

6. Founder

7. How it all began

8. Business Overview

9. References

Vakilsearch is a legal tech company that facilitates the professional services industry in India for both the B2B and B2C sector. Their services cover all the legal needs of businesses which includes incorporation, government registrations & filings, accounting, documentation and annual compliances. They also offer a wide range of personal services including marriage registration, name change, property agreements, and more. They provide one-click access to individuals and businesses for all their legal & professional needs.

In addition to the service division, Vakilsearch has a product division that caters to lawyers and advocates. They have two products - Libra and Steno. Libra is a cloud based legal case practice management software for advocates and lawyers to manage their cases. It is available both on the web and as a mobile application. Steno is a speech to text conversion tool that recognizes and understands legal vocabulary to help lawyers create content and draft documents.

Inception

Vakilsearch was founded in 2011 by Hrishikesh A Datar, a lawyer by qualification, to make the legal process simple and easy for individuals and businesses. It started out as an online marketplace portal to schedule appointments with lawyers across India.

A few months down the line, the company started providing online drafting services of rental and employment agreements. This was the beginning of the extensive suite of legal services they now offer. The large volume of business in legal sector and the avenue to use the online platform was the perfect marriage to bridge the gap in the legal service industry.

Evolution in business model

Vakilsearch majorly focussed on online services that enables startups, offering a wide range of services, covering company incorporation, intellectual property, accounting and audit, licenses and registrations, compliances, tax and more, some of which would go on to capture 1% of the Indian market. All these services, made available online, worked well with the booming interest in entrepreneurship. This led to building strong relationships with chartered accountants, company secretaries and lawyers across India.

The company offers legal consultation at no cost which is a welcome move to entrepreneurs, especially to those who start out with just the business ideas but lack the knowledge on the nitty-gritty of building a business.

Having established well as a pro-entrepreneurial legal service enabler, providing end-to-end services online, they also tried to venture into personal need-based services for individuals. Now, they have set up a marketplace for need-based services like marriage registration, property related services, legal name change, consumer complaints, debt recovery, and more.

Expansion and growth

What started out as a tiny team working out of a small office in Chennai, tripled in just a year’s time. As Vakilsearch is operating as an online service, they strengthened their online transaction system by introducing a Customer Relationship Management System, which facilitates smooth and easy online transaction of documents, and tracks progress of any service. This helped them scale their business volume and in their second year, they serviced to over 35,000 customers, achieving 300% year-on-year growth continuously for the first few years.

In 2015, their team size grew to 140 and had their presence in major cities like Chennai, Bengaluru, , Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi, with over 100 affiliates across India. With their self-serve platform to choose a service and pay online, they easily penetrated into tier-II and -III cities for delivery of localised services. Almost at the same time, the product division was introduced to develop software tools for advocates.

Currently, with a team of 200+, they cater to PAN India for all legal services with strong associations with government and non-government organizations like the Government of Andhra Pradesh^[1], Confederation of Indian Industry(CII), StartUp India, Sulekha, Axis Bank, HDFC, and more. The product division took several turns and what was ideated as a platform for lawyers and clients to interact, now has shaped up as a legal practicing case management software which is well received by the legal community.

Awards and recognition

Vakilsearch won the Ritz Entrepreneurship award^[2] in 2015 and the Pride of TamilNadu award in 2018.

Funding

Having won the Ritz Entrepreneurship Awards in 2015, Vakilsearch drew a lot of attention from potential investors and had raised capital from Kalaari Capital and Dr Agarwal's Group.

Founder

Hrishikesh A Datar, a graduate of the 2010 batch of National Law School of India University, Bangalore, founded Vakilsearch in 2011. He was featured in the Forbes 30 under 30^[3], Asia for Enterprise Technology 2017^[4].

How it all began

He started a T-shirt business in college revealing his second nature as business. He once had an opportunity to present an idea for LawWeb, a portal to provide quality content to lawyers, at IIM, Bangalore. A member of the audience shot a question at him - ‘Why not instead help people find lawyers online?’. This planted the idea of business in the legal space which now has moulded into a legal tech platform.

Business Overview

Broadly, Vakilsearch has two main divisions - service and product. They provide services to both B2B and B2C. The products are developed for professionals, mainly for those in the legal community.

Overall they have over 100 services which are available completely online.

• For businesses:

All B2B services are startups focussed which include services like company registration, trademark registration, compliances, secretarial services and more.

• For Individuals:

B2C services are personal need-based like marriage registration, property registration, debt recovery, and more.

• Libra

LIBRA is a cloud based SaaS product which is a practice management software exclusively developed for lawyers that helps in managing cases, clients, schedule, track billing and conduct legal research. It is available both in web and mobile application. It is a tool that combines the two popular services in the market - case hearing alerts providers and legal research material database providers. Lawyers find it easy to have the two most important factors that is key for their legal practice in one place.

• Steno

Steno is a recently launched speech to text conversion tool that recognizes and understands the legal vocabulary with more than 90% accuracy. It is a hands-free typing tool that Vakilsearch claims can draft a page of content in less than 2 minutes.

References

• Charlene Marshall
• Charlene McKenna
• Charlene McMann
• Charlene Pesquiera
• Charlene Pryer
• Charlene Rajendran
• Charlene Rendina
• Charlene Riva Federer
• Charlene Strong
• Charlene Thomas-Swinson
• Charlene (Transformers)
• Charlene Tse
• Charlene V. Edwards-Honeywell
• Charlene White
• Charlene Wyatt
• Charlene Yi
• Charleroi Airfield
• Charleroi airport
• Charleroi Cougars
• Charleroi Historic District
• Charleroi Locks & Dam
• Charleroi-Monessen Bridge
• Charleroi, pa
• Charleroi Premetro
• Charleroi SC