How a mother of two is trying to re-initiate the betterment of legal services in India.
Her day starts with mental planning on what to cook for breakfast for her two sons and what to pack for their lunch breaks in school. The younger one, 4 years old, goes to school at 8.00 am and the older one, 7 years, at 9.30. The enterprising mind gets set from the very morning when she has to ensure that both the kids are well fed, bathed, dressed and sent to school with smiling faces. Once the kids are in the school bus the mom changes the role to entrepreneur, business women and the Chief of the office. She remains in this mode for almost next 10 hours everyday.
She is Suparna Moitra, an ex Infosys and Accenture employee turned into an entrepreneur by desire and not by compulsion. Suparna worked for the IT giants for more than 15 years and took the plunge to start a business and the sector which she chose was certainly not the most lucrative one. She chose to bring in the much needed change in the legal sector which, without any contention is full of grey areas and has lot of room for improvements.
She along with her husband and business partner Abhimanyu Shandilya started VIDHIKARYA LEGAL SERVICES LLP, an online platform to seek legal advice and find and engage lawyer(s). What was (is) innovative in her ways of providing the online platform is that it was (is) completely different from all other online platforms available to find a lawyer. She being a hardcore Computer Science Engineer leveraged the technology in rightful manner to really make the whole process of finding a lawyer through www.vidhikarya.com platform an easy process. Suparna had handled many critical projects, in her earlier employments, which had direct impact on the market perception of those companies. So, she very well knew that what works well for the people and thus decided not to go through the beaten path. She was clear that Vidhikarya will not make the users to scan through hundreds of lawyers’ profile and thus add to the confusion of the users. What she did is that by employing automation and little bit of artificial intelligence, she built a system which makes the user just describe and post the legal issue, rest is taken care by the system and processes and the right lawyers are connected to the user (client).
She also very well knew that the biggest missing link in the legal services sector is none other than the TRUST factor. In general the clients are apprehensive about engaging lawyers whereas lawyers are not sure whether the client will be paying the fees for next hearing date or not. Knowing this, she made it a point to build the bridge, trust, and fill the chasm lying between the common men and the lawyers. The technology is exploited to bring in the best possible solution and offerings and it was aided by the human intervention as part of Vidhikarya’s business process to ensure that users do get the feel and real experience that legal services can be sought and provided with ease.
Vidhikarya has been in existence since February 2016 and is growing in all respect like, user satisfaction, revenue, number of employees, offerings, geographical reach etc. The most important of all is that Vidhikarya is able to bring smile on to the faces of people from all strata of the society. It’s VIDHIK MITRA project is helping people seek legal advice from expert lawyers and its not that just the rich people are getting the services but people from bottom of pyramid are too.
