One of my favorite quotes is “In entrepreneurship, you live a few years of your life like no one

else does, so that you can live the rest of your life like no one else can!” I believe
entrepreneurship is for people who want to see a change in the way they lead their daily lives. I
feel that if I can, in some way, impact the life of a few people, I want to give my idea a shot and
see how it works.

A really good example of this is LawRato. Its seeds were sown when the founder Rohan
Mahajan was left dangling for help when a legal issue cropped up during his stint. With 3 crore
pending matters and 17 lakh new cases filed each month in various courts in the country, there
was no transparent way to get access to the right lawyer so far. This becomes graver as one in
five clients seeking legal consultation files a case. This makes it a whopping 1 crore
consultations each month with most of us not knowing where and how to find the right lawyer,
we end up either reaching out to someone through a close reference or finding one through local
directory listings. Either of these routes has no way to promise the credibility and quality of the
lawyer as references are mostly based on one or two past experiences and local listings have no
control over who is listing themselves as professionals. Then came LawRato.com where the core
service that they provide is to help users get free legal advice from experienced lawyers in India.

I feel that LawRato managed to succeed and is still one of the most sought after websites because
their core belief to break the fundamental barrier by making justice more accessible for people
and businesses (small businesses and start-ups) –by helping them understand their basic legal
rights, find right lawyers, as there is no public record for around 20 lakh lawyers’ performance
data in India, and handle legal aspects of setting up and running hiring lawyers and free legal
advice. They try to customize the service that they provide to their users. They also allow users
to reach out to lawyers via email, phone, video calling, and face-to-face meetings. A few years
ago, Mahajan received a call from Nirbhaya’s parents who were looking for a lawyer. Despite all
the media coverage, they had no help when the case reached the Supreme Court. He had said that
when the verdict came out he realized that he was doing something right irrespective of the
financial success. LawRato has answered over 1 lakh legal questions and has close to 50,000
lawyers. It has launched a Hindi website and will soon offer other languages. Headquartered in
Delhi, the startup plans to open offices in Mumbai and Bangalore as well as launch an app.
Many legal start-ups fail within the initial five years, they start with enthusiasm, good plans but
ultimately they fail. It is very important to understand the reason behind this. The author of the
book “E-Myth Revisited” Michael Gerber says “If your business depends on you, you don’t own
a business. You have a job and it’s the worst job in the world”. Most startups do not succeed
because the entrepreneur works in the startup than on the startup. So there is a lack of creativity
and the startup tends to grow without a plan. Startups do not fail because they are startups.
Startups themselves are risky. But a startup is nothing more than a small room full of people, all
working on an idea. When we talk about startup failure rates, we should be talking about people
more than we talk about the business nature of an idea in the making. In most cases, startups fail
because the founders get so stuck on their original idea, they want to do everything in their
power to prove it can work. Even worse, startups that raise money tend to spend a good portion
of those funds on marketing and PR-which means spreading the message of something you are
not even sure, will work yet. All these aspects need to be kept in mind when we talk about or
plan a startup like LawRato.