LawBasket : A New-Age Tech Solution For An Age-Old Profession

LawBasket has been shaking up the start-up scene in Zimbabwe as the Uber of legal services for small to medium enterprises. By pooling law professionals continent wide onto a single online platform, LawBasket is poised to become the largest law firm in Africa spread out across 25 countries.

The innovative start-up was founded in December 2018 by Simba Mubvuma and Blessing Makuni, both wielding a wealth of knowledge through working in Zimbabwe's top law firms for four years. Mubvuma in particular was nominated in the Forbes Africa Under 30 category for technology. Keep reading to know more insights on LawBasket from its founder Simba Mubvuma.

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What was the idea behind LawBasket? For every 100 people in the world with a new justice problem every year, only 18 have their most pressing legal pinpoint resolved. To be honest, if you got 18 out of a 100 in a test, you would have failed. Justice as it is currently set up is failing. Our plan: to overhaul and re-engineer the machinery of justice using a tech driven approach.

Why was the LawBasket project implemented? Our goal is very simple. With our technology, a business or individual in Zimbabwe can easily find and hire a registered and duly practicing lawyer in Kigali, get that lawyer to do their case, and be able to pay that lawyer once the job is complete using our technology. Similarly, law firms and lawyers in Africa can now also be easily found by external businesses and individual clients through our technology.

What does LawBasket do? We are a legal technology startup that is building a massive community of lawyers and clients from across Africa, all using our technology to deliver, access and monetize legal services through our online platform.

How does LawBasket impact the community? Within the first two months of launch, we have managed to assemble lawyers from across the continent, and we are now bigger that all the top ten law firms in Zimbabwe combined. This allows us to offer greater consumer choice, and to leverage on our wide network to deliver community driven projects such as the Law Clinics which we are running with the Impact Hub Harare and As I Am Foundation. With LawBasket, we have built an army of lawyers ready to reimagine and reinvent justice in Africa.

What challenges have been encountered in building this startup? Our biggest challenge has been the very low internet access rate amongst many Africans. This limits our growth and curtails our model. Whilst internet usage continues to grow in Africa, there is still a huge chunk of society without access to the internet as a basic need. To tackle this problem, we are leveraging a network of lawyers we have to deliver Law Clinics on a grassroots level, such as the clinic coming up this June at Hopely Tariro School in Harare. We hope to expand this grassroots traction to allow more people to benefit from the massive community we are building with LawBasket.

Any future plans for the growth of LawBasket? Our future growth plans are not elaborate. We plan to grow out network of lawyers to 1000 by the end of 2019, and to have a lawyer-client ratio of 3 to 1 on LawBasket. We are also working to get into legal protection insurance, which will help mitigate the risk of costly legal expenses for small businesses and startups.

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Visit https://www.mylawbasket.com/ to be a part of this budding startup!

Simba Mubvuma (Credit: Forbes Africa)