In the Philippines, where lawyers and law students abound, some would wonder why no one has thought of this startup idea before. Legal research has always been a cumbersome task, especially going through numerous legal doctrines, thousands of Supreme Court decisions, circulars, and laws — most of the time, still through tediously traditional means.
Well that’s until the MyLegalWhiz (MLW) mobile service came into the picture. It aims to revolutionize the way lawyers, law students – and anyone else – does legal research. MyLegalWhiz reckons that the country has 90,000 lawyers and law students, who are all potential subscribers. The service was soft-launched this June to two law schools in Manila and already has 200 paid subscribers and that’s still growing.This is a startup founded by Dexter Feliciano when he was still a third-year law student in the De La Salle-FEU MBA JD Program. He was subsequently admitted to the bar last year. He might be a lawyer now but is currently not in practice – that’s so as to focus on his innovation. Currently, MLW has five other team members, focusing on mobile and business development.
MLW is a web-based app and that uses cloud-based syncing so that a subscriber’s research content can be saved across different computers and smartphones.Subscription to the service is currently offered at Php 999.00 (US$23.63) for a one-year subscription which in turn serves as the revenue source for the startup. The team is currently searching for a strategic investor. MLW is one of “several ideas” that will be implemented by the company vehicle of the product, Thinc Office Corp.
The startup claims it does not have direct competitors to date, and services such as CDAsia and eSCRA which also provides legal research resources are considered a complement to the use of MLW. Dexter adds:
MyLegalWhiz is introducing mobile legal research outsourcing that will make its legal research dynamic and updated through feedback and the input of subscriber/users.
A cloud-based tagging technology will also help subscribers in organizing their research content.
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