Picture this: you\u2019re less than a year into life as the Founder and Managing Director of a boutique law firm. Business is progressing well and recently you\u2019ve been finding yourself with a couple of hours spare at the end of each day. So what do you do? Take up taekwondo, become a pub quiz regular, read Russian literature?<\/p>\n
You surely wouldn\u2019t consider using those precious hours to start another venture in LegalTech and incubate it through your current company? Or would you?<\/p>\n
For Azmul Haque<\/strong> the answer is that he would, and, what\u2019s more, he has.<\/p>\n The 39-year-old entrepreneur, and former big law lawyer\u00a0(with stints at\u00a0Berwin Leighton Paisner\u00a0and Olswang), set up Collyer Law LLC in Singapore in 2015,\u00a0as a licensed Singapore law practice\u00a0to provide cradle-to-exit legal services for entrepreneurs, high-growth start-ups and SMEs.<\/p>\n Yet, just eight months later found himself starting up a LegalTech side project called FirstCOUNSEL which uses technology to enable efficiency in service-delivery, and is aimed at a smaller subset of the same clientele as Collyer Law.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.legalgeek.co\/event\/singapore-event\/<\/p>\n He says his two\u00a0legal ventures are now, in total, servicing approximately 150 clients with a workforce of just 12 (although that doesn\u2019t include\u00a0FirstCOUNSEL\u2019s\u00a0\u2018gig economy\u2019 lawyers delivering\u00a0\u201con-demand\u201d legal support services). Haque\u2019s day is split unequally between the two ventures working for approximately 8\u00a0hours on Collyer Law and an additional 2\u00a0hours on FirstCOUNSEL (where he has a COO handling\u00a0the\u00a0day-to-day\u00a0operations).<\/p>\n Azmal Haque is evidently passionate about servicing the early-stage economy and he describes his decision to set-up FirstCOUNSEL so soon after founding Collyer Law as borne out of the realisation\u00a0that new law alone \u201cwas not sufficient as there were completely under-served parts of the legal market, such as first-time entrepreneurs and (very small) SMEs who saw lawyers, and \u2013 therefore sound legal advice \u2013 as being unaffordable and unattainable.\u201d<\/p>\n The services provided by Collyer Law and FirstCOUNSEL dovetail nicely. FirstCOUNSEL targets the very early-stage economy by automating part of the legal support delivery process and providing a team of roving in-house counsel who are hired on-demand by clients.<\/p>\n Whilst Collyer Law offers a\u00a0traditional attorney-client relationship, it still seeks to disrupt the big boys by, in Haque\u2019s own words, \u201cmoving away from hourly billing, offering personalised senior-level attention, combined with a pragmatic problem-solving approach.\u201d<\/p>\n On the immediate horizon in Q1 for Haque is closing a seed round for FirstCOUNSEL which will be\u00a0focused on\u00a0raising funds from\u00a0friends, family and\u00a0supporters.\u00a0Whilst in the pipeline there are commercial partnership arrangements with a corporate services firm and a platform for SMEs.<\/p>\n Haque elaborates that\u00a0longer term\u00a0objectives include\u00a0automating a process for curating the selection of the on-demand lawyers and using data analytics to ensure their areas of expertise can be easily assessed by FirstCOUNSEL\u2019s clients.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are building up a database of feedback from each lawyers\u2019 work as well as a database showing what work each lawyer has previously done for other clients,\u201d Haque explains.<\/p>\n \u201cBut lawyers don\u2019t desperately like reviews, so this will take a bit of time. It\u2019s a bit like the fear restaurant owners had of TripAdvisor in the beginning. But this transparency can be their friend as well.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Picture this: you\u2019re less than a year into life as the Founder and Managing Director of a boutique law firm. Business is progressing well and recently you\u2019ve been finding yourself with a couple of hours spare at the end of each day. So what do you do? Take up taekwondo, become a pub quiz regular, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21647,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-legal-geek-of-the-week","category-read"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n