One of the most well known facts about legal services is their lack of affordability for just about anyone but rich people and businesses. For most Indians, legal services are out of reach. But that is beginning to change. Thankfully in recent years, a number of disruptive online legal solutions have emerged in India, making legal services available at reasonable prices. And they’re typically able to do this through a clever combination of automation, outsourcing, and doing away with lavish offices.

One such legal marketplace is kaanoon.com that makes highly quality legal solutions accessible and affordable to all.Intending to change the way people get legal help in India, the website helps individuals get their legal questions answered,consult lawyers on the phone, hire a lawyer for various fixed-price legal services, and to find a competent lawyer without wasting thousands of rupees on the wrong lawyer.

How Did kaanoon.com Start?

The inception of kaanoon.com takes us back to a time when its founder, Amit Goel was shopping around for properties in India. As he was reviewing the purchase agreements and other property contracts, there were many occasions where he required legal guidance to facilitate negotiation terms with sellers. He posted relevant queries online on a few sites that existed at that time, but to his surprise, he did not receive any responses from lawyers. Constrained, he hired a lawyer and paid thousands of rupees to get answers to simple questions.

What was worse - to get a second opinion, he hired another lawyer and paid another few thousand rupees. Some thing was clearly wrong. Getting quick legal help should not be so expensive, he thought. This thought persisted in his mind for many months as he tried to devise a viable solution to this problem. He discussed this problem at length with friends,family, and lawyers. Over time, he sensed an opportunity, and finally decided to pursue it actively in 2013.

From the research he did in those months, it was clear that there was a huge untapped opportunity in legal space in India. He did what entrepreneurs typically do: he tested the market before doing a full launch. He created a fake three-page website and sent traffic to it via Google Ad Words. The response was overwhelmingly positive, which proved the demand for online legal solutions. Amit even found the domain name kaanoon.com readily available to buy, which further convinced him of the lack of attention to online legal solutions in India. The opportunity seemed too exciting to ignore and he had to give it a try. Thus kaanoon.com was born.

Since inception, Kaanoon recruited good lawyers and ensured that they were benefitting from their participation. Throwing light on his experience while recruiting lawyers,Amit speaks,“I didn’t want to start building the site until I had commitment from lawyers, and I was afraid lawyers would not commit until I showed them a real website with real traffic and a potential to generate leads. I spent a few months reviewing and shortlisting good lawyers, having phone calls with them, understanding their needs, and convincing them that they will be able to grow their practice with this website. After enough lawyers agreed, I built and launched the site, while keeping in touch with the lawyers throughout. When I finally launched the site, for a few days after launch, not a single lawyer signed up.I realized that while it was easy for lawyers to commit participation out of politeness, when it was finally time to sign up, they didn’t have time. If lawyers didn’t have time to sign up, then how would they spend time participating on the site? I had to do some thing.”

In the next few days, Amit pursued lawyers continuously by email and over the phone and even took their information and registered a few of them himself. Finally,enough lawyers signed up and he opened up the site to real traffic.

From day one, the users and lawyers loved the site and he has never looked back ever since.

Think of Kaanoon as your virtual team of lawyers ready to provide quick legal advice any time.

Your Virtual Team of Lawyers

Run by a highly experienced team of enthusiastic individuals, Kaanoon provides an online marketplace where individuals can get their legal questions answered anonymously, set up a phone consultation with a lawyer of their choice,or hire a lawyer for various fixed-price legal services. The company’s legal advisory services span across a wide range of areas like family law, marriage, divorce,498a,child custody, domestic violence, property law, landlord-tenant laws, criminal law, civil law, among others. Additionally, Kaanoon’s legal services include sending a legal notice, reviewing legal documents, reviewing property papers, reviewing contracts, reviewing lease papers, power of attorney, to name a few. “Our target audience is Indians and NRIs all over the world who need legal help on matters subject to Indian laws,” mentions Amit.

The fact that Kaanoon delivers high quality legal solutions is evident from their customers who have benefitted by receiving quick legal help in matters of divorce, criminal cases, property-related issues, tenant-landlord issues, and others. In one of the many legal disputes that the Kaanoon platform has helped resolve, Amit points out that one of their customers was being threatened with a lawsuit by his landlord claiming that he was responsible for the serious damages that had occurred to the rental property. Instead of hiring a lawyer, this customer was able to use kaanoon.com to get the legal help he needed by getting his questions answered privately on the site from multiple lawyers. The tenant opened a private discussion on the site, described the situation, and multiple lawyers responded their advice in that discussion thread. As active discussion continued over the next few weeks, the discussion thread ended up containing the entire history of the case, and the lawyers continued to provide expert advice in the same thread, helping the tenant navigate through the legalities of the case as the case evolved.

“As a result of the advice the tenant received on kaanoon.com, he was able to get back to the landlord with confident legal answers every time, because the tenant had a virtual team of lawyers secretly helping him at every step – lawyers he had never met or spoken to. The tenant was able to argue with the landlord that the clauses in the rental agreement were vague and were not sufficient to hold the tenant liable for the damages. In short, the tenant was able to defend himself confidently based on the advice he received from multiple lawyers on kaanoon.com, and the landlord quickly backed off. Without kaanoon.com, the tenant would have spent at least five times the amount of time and money on finding such legal help,” explains Amit.

Kaanoon: Unique Selling Points

Kaanoon provides an online platform to receive quick, affordable, and quality legal advice from lawyers all over the country. Since its beginning, the site has been mobile-friendly and 100 percent secure, using 256-bit SSL encryption so users can be assured that their information is safe on the site and they can focus on getting their question answered. Questions asked on the site typically receive answers from multiple lawyers in a few hours during the day. Users can also see which lawyers are currently online and can request immediate phone consultation with a lawyer of their choice.

Kaanoon sets a high bar for lawyers to participate on the site by carefully monitoring lawyer activity on the site, and by incorporating user feedback ratings at every step. Low performing lawyers get filtered out quickly and automatically. This automatic quality control has helped Kaanoon tremendously in becoming a platform where users can find a competent lawyer and receive quality legal advice. In other words,Kaanoon is a smarter way to get legal help.

Kaanoon is also the smarter way for lawyers to find new clients. For lawyers, Kaanoon enables them to become part of its panel of lawyers, answer questions on kaanoon.com and build their feedback ratings.“Lawyers can show case their subject matter expertise on a popular online forum without the need to write their own blog, which can be very time-consuming and may not get much attention. In addition, lawyers can also choose to provide fixed-fee legal services on kaanoon.com. We handle the billing upfront, so lawyers can focus on helping the clients,” Amit says.

“Our core competency is the strong relationships we have built with our participating lawyers over time, and in ensuring that their needs are met. As long as our lawyers feel welcome on kaanoon.com and continue to receive benefit from their participation on the site, they will be happy to provide quality legal services in a timely manner,” he adds.

Growth of the Company

Over the last three years, Kaanoon has built a strong team of carefully hand picked individuals in technology, user experience,and marketing, which is a testimony of their objective. A small but nimble company, Kaanoon believes in being passionate about solving customers’problems, hiring smart people who get along well with the team, and exploring and living work to the fullest. Accordingly, the company has grown tremendously since its launch in November 2013, and their revenue has increased ten times in the last two years.

There is no dearth of legal problems in India, and Kaanoon is well positioned to solve these problems.As far as roadmap is concerned,Kaanoon has identified key legal areas where they can provide value to the citizens, and is actively working on them.