Offering legal advice and a library of legal resources, the legal standpoint app aims to bring justice to all.
The high cost of legal services is the biggest barrier to giving all South Africans equal access to justice. The Legal Standpoint app, a ‘legal tech’ platform, could change this by making legal resources more easily available.
The law applies to every person, yet so few people really understand it, and even fewer can afford access to lawyers, says Keitumetse Pule, a qualified lawyer and co-founder and CEO of Legal Standpoint. She tells us all about her ambition to democratise access to legal services in South Africa.
Why did you create the Legal Standpoint app?
I grew up in Soweto surrounded by difficult socioeconomic conditions where I was constantly hearing stories about people who had their rights violated, but either didn’t have the money to hire lawyers or didn’t know what their rights were.
The two problems we are trying to solve with Legal Standpoint is to give people access to the law, to both educate people and to give them a way to access legal services. While studying law, my co-founder and I agreed that legal jargon was difficult for the average person to understand.
So we wanted to help educate people. On the legal-services side, we understood that hiring a lawyer can be quite costly, especially if you come from a poor background.
The Legal Standpoint app is free to download and the lawyers we promote through the app offer lower rates because they are independent practitioners and not aligned to any of the big law firms. We must be very selective about who we put on the platform because we want to be sure that they’re offering solid advice.
Each lawyer’s profile includes their areas of specialisation, where they are based, and which languages they speak. Users can then scroll through the directory of different lawyers, interacting with them, and even book an in-app consultation.
What business challenges have you faced?
I have learned that you need to always be willing to change and adapt. Originally our primary goal was to democratise access to legal services and make these accessible to as many South Africans as possible. But, as a business, you have to let the data guide you.
When we looked at the data for who is actually using our app, we saw that it’s mostly businesses and working professionals. So now we want to ‘niche down’ or focus on the business category to make sure that we cater to the people who are using the app the most.
Also, when we started out, we wanted to build a marketplace with as many lawyers on the platform as possible, but trying to convince them to join has been quite an uphill battle.
We’re currently trying to figure this out and how to work around.
What is the next success milestone?
In the future, the Legal Standpoint app will be just one of our products. There is a whole bunch of things we want to venture into, and we want to create as many tools and platforms as we can to solve the problem of access to justice. For example, we are currently looking at how we can incorporate artificial intelligence into the app.
We are evaluating a chatbot at the moment and its responses have been pretty accurate. In action, the chatbot could provide people with swift answers to their questions without users having to sift through long legal documents.
What challenges do you anticipate?
Mainly we’re trying to gain a competitive advantage by being the first to market with this type of offering. We are aware of another chatbot that was recently introduced to the market. It is a WhatsApp chatbot, aimed at doing something similar to us, which is why we’re trying to move quickly on this.
Also, having enough information to train the model is important because we have to be able to give our users real-time, accurate answers. So, we are focussed on using first-mover advantage, but also being willing to adapt based on customer feedback.
Your advice for future entrepreneurs?
Being an entrepreneur is tough, but if I was given the choice, I would choose entrepreneurship every time. In entrepreneurship, there is not a straight path to get to where you want to go. It is a roller-coaster journey. There are seasons where things are going smoothly and others where things are slower. Something that I do not think people share enough is that you need to be wary of false signals of success. When you launch your product there will often be a lot of good feedback, but do not confuse that hype with success.
Just because you’re doing interviews or you’re on magazine covers, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve made it. Separate your ego from your business and focus on the metrics that matter, like revenue or user growth, for example.
Legal Standpoint numbers to date
- Launched in 2022
- First app transaction happened in 48 hours
- Currently 18 verified lawyers available
- 216 articles available in 3 languages
Available on Android and Apple iOS
Words by: Joanne Carew @Littlecarew
