...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.
