Rightstars

Access to justice is broken. Our community is here to fix it.

Last Funded January 2023

$74,700

raised from 60 investors

Highlights

1
Our mission is to make basic legal services affordable for everyone (UN goal 16)
2
Enormous TAM. Around 5 billion low- and medium income individuals don't get their justice needs met
3
Founder market fit. CEO has previously built a $50m revenue B2C legal tech (YC W14, AirHelp)
4
More than 1,700 lawyers have joined our active legal community

Featured Investor

Our Team

I decided to become a lawyer to help people. I realized over time that the best way I can help people is to change the legal industry. To make justice more accessible. I started with Airhelp. Now comes Rightstars.

The Justice Gap cannot be fixed with software alone

Although software will be a key driver, it cannot stand alone. Our approach is to build a mass market software solution together with a community of thousands of lawyers. 

Our CEO was a late founder of AirHelp and took it from 8 to 800 employees during seven years and several funding rounds. However, helping air passengers is just the very top of a large iceberg of underserved individuals, who don't have access to justice. As recognized by the United Nations, this is one of the most important global issues: UN goal 16.

According to the World Justice Project an estimated 2/3 of the World's population do not have access to basic legal services. Surprisingly, in a developed country like the US, which do not lack lawyers, the issue is equally persistent as research by American Bar Association shows.

On the other hand, law firms do not have very strong brands known by the general public. Unless you are a lawyer yourself, I doubt you can name the biggest four law firms in the World. Even worse for the smaller firms. There is no brand recognition and clients have low frequency.

Big law has begun to adopt various modern software solutions to improve the efficiency of their work delivery. They also have hundreds of paralegals, secretaries and even marketing teams to facilitate much of the tedious work. Small law has none of that. They are extremely self-reliant. The lawyers must find clients, do all the research, the contract drafting, the meeting bookings, create invoices and keep track of payments themselves.  

Our platform's first touch is to connect the underserved groups. We figure out if you have a real legal problem that needs a lawyer and if yes, connect you with several lawyers that specializes in that exact problem. Using fintech, our second touch is to make it more affordable to purchase legal services. Finally, our third touch is automation of popular legal services. Driving cost down. We will participate as a direct provider of those automated legal services. 

We are building a complete end-to-end client to lawyer relationship. From initial match, to scope of work, delivery, payment and finally rating.

Above is showcasing our actual product from a user perspective. We have developed the entire platform ourselves using mobile first principles and the with the intent to be able to launch the platform in any market.

Above is showcasing our actual product from a lawyer perspective. Our ambition is to be the front door, the financial infrastructure and a community for the millions of lawyers that work alone and in small firms.

Our mid and long term strategy for user acquisition is a mix of SEO and strategic partnerships. An example is our know-your-rights pages that simultaneously guide users and are great for key-word optimization. On the partnership side, we are in dialogue with many and have recently signed a deal with Justamente to provide their lawyer base access to our marketplace. 

We have launched our first two revenue streams. The first is a SaaS freemium model for lawyers who want access to our community (free) and access to the marketplace (paid). The second revenue model is our "digital first law firm". We provide legal services directly in the areas of corporate, contract and consumer law. That type of work is popular and similar = something that can be automated. As we grow this, the product offering will be a mix of DIY templates and expert advice at fixed fees. Finally, our third planned revenue stream is a transaction fee for facilitating the deposit/release and instalment payment flows. This fintech product is built on top of a large fintech provider, making us able to scale the product fast to other markets as all the licenses are already in place. 

One of the pain points of marketplaces is conversion from listing to actual hire. Our lawyer community complained to us about the conversion numbers from existing legal service marketplaces. Based on their feedback we estimate the industry conversion to hover around 5%. We already got to almost 3x better conversion than industry average and keep focus on improving.

Oct-Dec are actuals, the rest projected. We expect $40,000 in annual revenue run-rate by April consisting of a good mix of the three revenue streams. Having subscription based revenue gives us consistency, the direct services a very high margin early on, and the payment module can be scaled outside the markets we otherwise operate it. The different models also allow us flexibility to offer different solutions depending on regulatory restraints and market behavior. 

One of our main challenges is to convince people that it is safe, easy and affordable to find and hire lawyers online. It will take time before it becomes a common thing. To speed it up, we are making sure that people who want to talk someone before actually hiring a lawyer can do it. We listen, guide and scope the case.

 

We are eight people with various backgrounds and skill sets. Our CEO, Christian, co-founded on of the most successful B2C legal techs, AirHelp (YC W14), and our CTO, Vinicius, co-founded and sold Fix to a larger competitor. Our investors include two VCs, Rockstart and Upright Ventures. Both Christian and Hakim, our CPO, were selected for the exclusive Latitud community for entrepreneurs in LatAm.

We decided to launch in Brazil. First of all, it's enormous. More than 1.2 million lawyers, growing fast and with a very high level of fragmentation. Close to 90% of all lawyers in Brazil work in small law. It is also the country with the highest lawyer density in the World with more than 6 lawyers per 1,000 people. We also know the market well. Christian spent three years building and scaling AirHelp in Brazil, Vinicius has built and exited a marketplace in Brazil and we have a total of five members on the team from Brazil. On our roadmap, we have several geographical expansions planned.

We have calculated our TAM in two different markets to show the different unit economics that can be achieved. Both have been calculated with a combination of marketplace subscriptions and payment module transaction fees.

Overview