Nabilah Safira
TechInAfrica – Gbadebo Ojikutu and Samson Adegunle came up with NextCounsel after seeing how demanding the lawyer’s tasks generally are. The young founders are passionate about software development and marketing, and they went through with the solution after a law firm requested them to create a simplified legal practice for lawyers. From then on, it has become a life mission for them.
An automated solution is what NextCounsel offered for lawyers. It automates their complete workflow by employing CRM, Time and Billing system, Document Management, and Accounting systems. It can run on the full web to the mobile interface. And it captures incoming requests without external integration, while also capable of rearranging and making back up of the existing documents. It also sends reminders to lawyers about the due court session.
Thus, the presence of this smart software has immensely reduced the time needed for their workload and makes their services affordable than before. In just 2 years, NextCounsel has brought 30 law firms and more than 1500 lawyers and eyeing an expansion to Ghana.
L-R Gbadebo Ojikutu (CEO), Samson Adegunle (COO, CTO)
Challenges remain on the front, like any other B2B ventures, the startup is still finding its place on penetrating the market. There seems to be a knowledge gap issue among legal practitioners. As Gbadebo said, some law firms are still stuck in the manual processes so much so that having a budget to cater to technological services seems a far-fetched idea. But in spite of this, the practicality of automation cannot be overruled. NextCounsel’s effort to overcome this is by charging marketers who convert prospective clients to paying clients. The result pays off. It has since received undisclosed funding from EchoVC Partners mainly to aid its expansion to Ghana in 2018 but doesn’t rely on it for the company’s growth. The startup licenses its own software for a monthly subscription and manages to generate over $85,000 in revenue.
Source: Techpoint.africa
