Future of Legal Services Entrepreneurship in India: Opportunities and Challenges

Abstract

Entrepreneurship has emerged as the engine of growth in the Indian economy, with entrepreneurs being the soul. Entrepreneurs contribute towards value creation, social impact and development in the society as a whole, which is now a widely acceptable truth.

Legal Services Entrepreneurship in India is one such area, which is gaining a rapid momentum. Earlier, the dimensions of Law were seldom associated with entrepreneurs in the form of lawyers, who were considered to be a cautious bunch focused on precedent, risk containment and tended to be reactive-not innovative. However, in the last two decades, rafts of legal entrepreneurs have emerged in the entrepreneurial space. They have tapped into the latent demand of access to legal services leading to differentiated, efficient, cost-effective, accessible, digitized and scalable legal products and services for corporate consumers. The Legal Services Entrepreneurs have blended legal, technological and process expertise in addition to capital to re-engineer legal delivery and provide easy, agile and affordable access to legal services. In contrast to a general entrepreneur, a legal entrepreneur is someone innovating the delivery of legal services or legal processes by starting their own business inserting concepts into actions, particularly witnessed in India.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the niche area of the challenges and opportunities of Legal Services Entrepreneurship in India. This paper with an attempt through qualitative research, panel discussions, interviews and review of literature will therefore attempt to study the future of Legal Services Entrepreneurship in India keeping in perspective the opportunities available and challenges faced by them.