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A bit about myself: I have had a software engineering background for 5+ years. I have tried and failed in building a startup 2 years ago. I am an engineer, from an old IIT, 2019 batch. Please take this post in the spirit of curiosity and not a rant.
What is this post about?
I have been forever curious about how the legal world and the tech world is so much mutually exclusive. Why is that so?
Basically, what I mean is, 0 people in tech know anything about legal world and vice-versa.
People don't know their rights, they get scammed by police, thugs and sometimes by their employer as well. The list is endless, spouse, tenant, even a road accident dispute. Whoever can fuck up with you will eventually do–I believe that is India's version of Murphy's law.
First reaction whenever this happens to a first timer is...pants down on a busy street. Are things always going to be this bad in our country?
Once someone gets trapped in such cases, even the most educated people in the society are not aware how to represent themselves. Here the worst victims are the ones who has been clean throughout their lives... they suffer the most...because of lack of knowhow of the legal system.
Why, in our country, people still afraid of things related to law/lawyers/police/people in power?
Lets say a police man misbehaves with some poor fellow, and if the poor fellow is not "connected" then he is literally hopeless. Also, even if you remove "poor" from the previous sentence,
the story will not change.
I will share a recent anecdote to put things in better perspective: recently I found myself searching for a lawyer, for a financial fraud case. I was at Bengaluru at that point of time, so infinite language barrier with police/local lawyers.
Also, no one in my friend circle had any idea how to search for a lawyer who can be trustworthy(wont scam me). I went online and talked to 10+ lawyers, all based in Bengaluru. All of them shared different quotes for taking my case. Some were good, some were high, and I had no idea how to evaluate these quotes. How do I filter the true ones?. I had 0 knowledge about what they are saying–no way I could trust them because there are so many miscellaneous expenses involved!
Also, one problem I faced was to share the case evidences with all of them...so many times, I have to repeat the same story, share evidences repeatedly....it was not the most fun time of my life !
A guy said it will cost 5k for the initial work(case prep/consultation etc), then 25k(including bribes to the police etc) and then if I get back my lost money then 20k(misc expenses) more. You know what the net amount we were trying to recover was 2Lac. And he asked me ~50k as fees to recover that amount. Ofcourse I didn't go ahead with him, but I found myself questioning that why is there no proper mechanism to find out about the legitimacy of the quotes he is claiming, or to cross check his competency based on his previous client feedback etc. While buying a mobile phone, we go through hundreds of trusted reviews...but here there was no option. I know there are websites which have this feature, eg: Lawrato. But to be entirely honest, I didnt find those reviews of any practical use. I found it very hard to trust a legal counsel online.
When I tried to look for a reference for a good lawyer, it took me 2+months to go through all of friends and ask them if they know someone. Eventually, I found someone good where I could trust of whatever he says.
I wanted to have a discussion on how the following challenges can be solved:
1. discoverability
2. trust(alternative of going via reference)
3. transparency money involved.
4. high visibility of client over every step of the procedure.
PS: Please forgive me of my ignorance if I said anything which is stupid/false in this post. As I said please take this in the spirit of curiosity. Can we make this process as straightforward as ordering a pizza? Would love to know your thoughts!