Vindad covers all legal services needed by businesses

Windad It is a platform for providing online legal services for businesses that has been operating since March 2016. Vindad provides a variety of legal services, which include the preparation and review of contracts, preparation of legal documents, telephone and online legal consultations, management of legal and criminal cases in various fields such as collection of claims, computer crimes and intellectual property. Vindad, which specializes in providing legal services to businesses, is about to enter its fourth year of operation. In a conversation with Mohammad Hossein Amiri, co-founder and CEO of Vindad, we talked about Vindad’s experiences and plans for the future:

What is Vindad’s plan for the fourth year of its activity?

In the first two years, we focused only on contracts. In the third year and despite the difficult economic conditions and the start of the corona virus epidemic, Vindad team members used all their efforts and resources every day to provide quality services in order to meet the needs and legal challenges of Iranian businesses. Related to legal and criminal lawsuits, we also covered business and judicial documents. In the fourth year, we plan to enter the field of company registration and changes and trademark registration. In 1400, we become a 360-degree service provider and provide zero to one hundred legal services needed by a business.

Why haven’t you entered the legal issues of company registration yet?

We decided to proceed step by step according to the capacities. We started with contracts, which are the biggest challenge for businesses. While providing this service, customers requested to provide other services in the field of legal documents such as petitions and complaints, and according to this need, we expanded the services. In the last few months, we have encountered many requests from customers regarding company and brand registration, for this reason, we found it appropriate to enter the topic of “registration and intellectual property”.

Since in context “Company registration” We have many service providers; What strategy do you have to stand out from them?

We focus on two issues; First of all, the quality of service is important. Unfortunately, in the company registration market, despite the large number of players, the quality of service is low, as we have many complaints about these companies. In addition to the poor service, the pricing is not standard; For example, these companies may charge 2 to 3 million tomans to register the added value, which takes about 15 minutes. As we provided very high quality in the field of contracts and consultations, we intend to provide quality services in this field as well.

Our other strategy is to use technology. The core of Vindad team are experts in the field of technology, and we tried to make the most of the technology in the systems that will be launched in the near future, and this makes the processes happen faster and easier, especially in the conditions of Corona. It will be very useful.

Why did you start your business by providing contract drafting and review services?

Because we had faced this problem ourselves. Before Vindad, we started a startup in the field of education called Yunesh and we were based in one of the famous accelerators. There, we and other startups faced many contractual issues. After researching the market, we found out that in the legal services market, many contracts are not drawn up by experts, and a lawyer who has no experience in writing contracts drafts a contract. On the other hand, entrepreneurs do not go to lawyers because of the exorbitant costs and prepare the contract themselves, due to their lack of expertise, many points are left out of their view, and this issue leads to the lack of growth of the company and creating problems for them. has it.

What is Vindad’s position in the legal services market?

99% of the legal services market in Iran is offline and traditional, which is owned by lawyers, law offices and legal institutions. In the online arena, most players connect the lawyer to the client through an intermediary, but Windad has a legal team that provides legal services. On the other hand, most of the activists in this field operate in a general way, that is, they provide all legal services and, like us, they do not specialize in a specific field.

Vindad has 30 to 40 percent of the market among businesses that provide legal services online. Our serious competitors are Dodsan startups, Lawyer Foundation, and collections that are active in the field of registration, such as Regist Farda and Hekar Behtar.

Why didn’t you use a platform model to provide legal services like some competitors?

At the beginning of the second year of Vindad’s activity, we tried the platform model and faced various challenges. In the legal field, a platform business cannot overcome market problems. Pricing by lawyers and its lack of transparency, case-by-case price variability, lack of access to lawyers, and the inability to control the level of their accountability are among the problems in this field. Therefore, the platform model is a challenging model.

On the other hand, legal services are based on trust. If trust is formed between the lawyer and the client, the platform will be removed from the cycle and the client will go directly to the lawyer from some point on. For these reasons, after some time, we decided to stop our activity in the form of a platform and focused on empowering the internal team and providing services by the team.

Another challenge is quality platforms. For the platform to work, it is necessary that the number of lawyers must be very large, and it cannot be done with, for example, 60 lawyers; Because each of the lawyers has their activity outside the platform and the platform will definitely be the second job of these people, that’s why a case may be left without a lawyer on the platform. On the other hand, when the number increases, quality control becomes difficult, and quality control in this area cannot be left to the user; Because in some cases, the lawyer may try his best but not in the client’s favor, and in this case, if the client wants to give the lawyer a grade, he will give a bad grade, so the validation will not be accurate.

Of course, these challenges are not only limited to Iran’s legal platforms, and we were even in contact with legal platforms in other countries such as India, England, Australia, etc., which were also facing these issues. Apart from these, lawyers should enter the issues in a specialized way, because a lawyer cannot enter all issues in depth and if this issue is not observed, the quality of the work will decrease.

During your activity, how much positive change did you feel in the legal status of businesses?

Unfortunately, in our country, the culture of using legal services and lawyers has not been established, and perhaps we have large companies in the country that still do not have a legal unit, and the CEO advances the contracts and then faces problems. For this reason, from the beginning, we focused on building culture and increasing legal literacy, and in this regard, during these three years, we published more than a thousand free and specialized articles by the legal content production team in the legal magazine, more than 20 free practical webinars. And we held a training, published 6 free e-booklets and tried to create awareness of the use of rights in the society, which I think we were successful because more than 4 million views of Vindad legal magazine and also with more than 20 thousand entrepreneurs and the business manager were in contact as contacts who registered on the Windad platform.

What are the legal challenges of businesses focused on?

There are many challenges. One of the fields is attracting capital, in which we had a strong presence and even participated in some investment agreements as legal representatives of investors or startup teams, and we were by their side from negotiation to setting up contracts. Another area that most startups and new businesses are involved in is starting a business without knowing the legal responsibilities that cause them to face problems along the way. Our country has weak and non-transparent laws in the field of e-commerce, and in most cases, not providing a license prevents businesses from operating. For this reason, people are required to know the rules before launching their startup, so we helped solve these challenges by developing technology-based tools; For example, we have a free tool called “Smart Legal Assessment” in which people who intend to start a business answer a few questions in this system in 6 steps and at the end receive a report on what actions to take. They have to do in order to legalize their business.

What other tools like “Smart legal evaluation tool” developedTheare you

Another of our popular tools “Electronic signature” It’s free. This issue became serious especially after the spread of Corona because many of our clients in the cities had problems signing contracts in legal documents due to the weakness of the postal system. Windad’s electronic signature system is completely legal and very secure. In this system, there are two stages of authentication, one stage is by the Shahkar system of the Ministry of Communications and the other stage is using civil registration data. A number of organizations and large companies also use this system.

Another one of our tools that was launched about a month ago is the “partnership share distribution” tool. In this tool, after answering the questions, people receive the percentage of shares proposed for partnership from the system. The suggested stock amount is based on the data that we have experienced in the team and the research that we have done in the market. The issue of participation is often not taken seriously in contracts, and fortunately, we had more than a thousand partnership contracts in various businesses in these 3 years, and this data helped us develop this tool.

Another tool is “Iran’s Laws and Regulations Online Reference” where we have provided all the laws and regulations and executive regulations and section letters related to business laws. There are various laws in this system, from the fields of banking and money laundering to the fields of cyber space, civil laws, trade, etc., which have been approved in different places, including the parliament, chambers of commerce, government, etc.

We also have another relatively old tool called “Q&A” where users can raise a legal debate or challenge. Vindad’s legal team is active in this system and they answer questions.

Have you defined a revenue model for these tools?

no These tools are free and are designed to inform and help businesses. Regarding the “Electronic Signature” tool, if organizations need more facilities, we will cooperate with them according to a revenue model, but its usual form is available for free. Currently, our revenue model is focused on providing legal services to businesses.

What tools and channels did you use in the field of marketing?

Our focus has often been on the content field, but now the “quality of service” and “ease of access” have drawn the audience to us and made people introduce Vindad to their colleagues, and this is our biggest channel to attract the audience. .

Has experience in attracting capitalTheare you

Yes. In July 1998, Vindad had a round of fundraising from Smart Up Ventures.

How did you meet Smart Up Ventures?

Since our investment ecosystem is small, everyone knows each other and we have also recognized SmartUp in the ecosystem communities. We had a great experience with SmartUp. Smartup has an agile and fast team and does not have the dominant problem of VCs, which is slowness in action. On the other hand, it offers professional mentoring in various fields, including growth, human resources, etc., which is one of its most important advantages.

for the next round of fund raising programThedo you have

Currently, by adopting different strategies, we are experiencing good growth and we are covering the costs with our own income and moving forward with the work.