Lawtrades 🤝 Pani Cooler, NYC Hangout with Kolkata Chai
Desi-derata
This email goes out to 1,313 South Asian legal professionals. Welcome to 50 new people just looking for some pani.
Lawtrades 🤝 Pani Cooler
Last year, I connected with Ashish Walia, co-founder of Lawtrades. I was impressed with the story of the company and how he and his co-founder Raad Ahmed persevered to get traction in a notoriously challenging space - legal services. I related to the story of how two South Asian lawyers (and friends since college) breaking new ground as entrepreneurs.
So when Ashish reached out to partner on a special offer for Pani Cooler (the first ever), I saw a great fit. I'll tell you why after I explain what Lawtrades is.
Lawtrades is for in-house teams looking to get more done with less spend. Demand for legal services fluctuates and varies, so you don't need someone full-time. You want a la carte legal expertise in a range of practice areas. And you want clear budgeting. That's what Lawtrades provides.
With Lawtrades, you choose your counsel from a deep bench ranging from commercial and corporate to privacy and intellectual property. You pay fixed hourly rates. And you get a dashboard with realtime updates on your spend.
Why we're partnering, and the exclusive offer for Pani Cooler
For the first partnership for Pani Cooler, I wanted to make sure it was a fit for this platform. The core of Pani Cooler's growth is getting South Asian lawyers hired and promoted. The right partners feed into this ecosystem by making the members' lives easier. Lawtrades helps in-house counsel accomplish more.
A key part of Lawtrades' growth has been word of mouth. So to spread word fast, there's an advantage in joining a densely connected high-value networks, like Pani Cooler.
So for Pani Cooler members, Lawtrades is offering a deal they've never offered before: 15 hours of legal work for free. You can use it to test-drive contract management, for a one-time project needing specialist talent, or for a custom use.
If you're interested in taking advantage of this deal, just hit reply and let me know.
Akaash Gupta, Director of Legal, Udemy: "We found immediate value with Lawtrades"
I wanted to learn about how Lawtrades has been used by actual companies. So I asked to speak with a customer from this community. I talked to Akaash Gupta, Head of Commercial Contracts at Udemy, an online education provider.
Akaash joined Udemy four years ago, "Udemy hired me to scale sales contract support for Udemy Business (the company's enterprise learning solution) which had exponential growth during my tenure." In his first year, Akaash was able to get traction around using his own template agreement. But a growing pipeline of larger enterprise customers often started pushing to use their own templates, which ran as long as 100 pages.
Udemy's legal team of three quickly became inundated with negotiating enterprise customer agreements. Before working with Lawtrades, these agreements typically took longer than a quarter to close. Akaash had been relying on outside law firms, but he found that these firms lacked the commercial context to negotiate the agreements effectively or efficiently. "They required a lot of oversight and review," Akaash recalled. These outside law firms weren’t making the legal team’s job any easier.
After Akaash tried Lawtrades he didn't want to go back, "We found immediate value with Lawtrades." Akaash quickly found that Lawtrades supplied his team with experienced former in-house counsel that worked at comparable SaaS companies. The Lawtrades counsel were able to talk to the customer and counsel effectively and was highly responsive to feedback on how its lawyers could work better with Udemy.
Now Akaash's team regularly gets enterprise agreements on customer templates closed in less than one quarter and sales can operate at a faster velocity. So he has great results for his business team.
One more thing
We've only discussed the half of what makes Lawtrades so effective. The key input to the business is the quality of counsel. Lawtrades attracts talented lawyers because it helps them achieve something scarce: control over their careers.
The flexibility of Lawtrades is what helps lawyers:
- spend more time with family or take things slower
- launch their own practice or business
- work while going back to school
- grow with Lawtrades as a long-term partner
Lawtrades is looking for legal talent to join its team. If you're interested in being fast-tracked to join the team, hit reply and let me know.
NYC Hangout with Kolkata Chai
Our NYC Hangout in Central Park is on - save the date for September 17, 2021 at 4:00-6:00 pm.
If you're tired of sitting around getting drinks or food in order to be social, this is different. We'll go for a stroll through Central Park as we reconnect with old friends and make new ones. And the drinks are coming to you - Kolkata Chai will supply.
Come meet co-founder Ani Sanyal as he shares the story of their contemporary riff on classic masala chai.
To make sure we have enough chai, register here.
The Indie Guide To Building Your Legal Network
Part of the mission of Pani Cooler is to help South Asian lawyers make the most of the powerful network of any legal professionals. I attribute any success I've had with my career to the relationships I've developed and grown. And I wrote the principles I used in The Indie Guide to Building Your Legal Network.
Here's what Amisha Patel had to say about The Indie Guide: "Your writing is clear and concise, and I like how you weave in personal anecdotes and stories from others. You also outline a very clear action plan. Even as someone not in the law school setting, I found this extremely valuable in thinking about ways to reinforce many of the lessons that needed reinforcing on how to present well in strengthening and nurturing my network."
Pick up your copy here.
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