"My lawyer." Bug work

Hello, Habr!
So it ends a year from the moment when we launched our My Lawyer online legal aid system. Today we want to talk about our hopes that were not justified. About our successes that we did not expect. And also about errors and "cones" that we made and filled.



That is our system, and what goals are pursued, we told the respected Habralyam here .
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Our main mistakes in strategy:

In the light of the crisis that broke out in 2008, we decided to focus the system on providing legal assistance to small and medium-sized businesses on an online subscription basis, and thereby fill the resulting vacuum of the law office and legal departments of small companies. Not here it was! System users for the entire period of our work have already acquired as many as two subscriptions. Awesome Startup! In this direction, we have suffered a complete collapse, but received a shaft of orders to initiate arbitration in offline mode. I had to forget about a quiet office life, throw bags with laptops into the car trunk, connect all our lawyers to the unlimited mobile Internet and during the breaks of court hearings frantically tapping on keyboards, answering questions of ordinary citizens with their legal problems. In short - legal outsourcing online was not needed by anyone. The list of legal sections that we have identified is still not claimed by 70%. Questions of legal protection of business, users of the system are not interested at all. Of the hundreds of our regular customers with whom we started working before launching the system, only one went to work with us online. The rest continue to insist on personal meetings in order to “rub the problem face to face”, drink some coffee, and then stand for a couple of hours in St. Petersburg traffic jams.

At launch, we absolutely did not take into account the presence of pseudocompetition on the Internet. There are even more law firms in the “dime a dozen” market, and more law firms. We will not talk about legal forums. An analysis of the work of the “competitors” showed that all their activities are aimed exclusively at “picking up the client” and then, in offline mode, start bringing him to the signing of the Agreement (Agreement). We addressed these structures more than twenty times with “our problems”. The answers came down to the fact that the lawyer (attorney) thanked for our appeal, asked to send him documents on “our situation”, after that he offered to come to his office to sign the Contract and pay the advance. The amounts of the advance were many times different from the amounts stated on the websites of these lawyers. Legal online service "was absent as a class." We could not find at least one site where we could help solve the problem online on a turnkey basis, as our lawyers solve problems. Through the website of a law firm, we placed an order to prepare the Consumer Protection Cases for submission to the court. No response has been received yet. However, the “colleagues-lawyers online” very much “cluttered the broadcast” on key phrases, which led to high costs for a breakthrough in search engines. Attempts to use directs did not lead to anything positive. Money wasted for nothing, and maybe they just didn’t really know what Direct is.

Before the launch, we simply did not hear anything about such concepts as “SEO”, “promotion” and “optimization”. The first three months attendance provided dear Habr. After that, the number of visitors fell "below the baseboard." The PR team we invited turned out to be a team of lazy and greedy blockheads. Placing banners on information sites and bulletin boards gave nothing. Articles about us on Interfax and other portals passed by us. Our masters began to give up and the "fuse" began to disappear. I had to urgently learn. As some of our clients say, “we have begun to warm our ears” in various forums of SEO-shnik, promoters and other comrade-masters, whom many of the Habrablars do not like.

Having no idea of ​​the differences between developers, programmers, web designers and system administrators, we found so many “jambs” that we were really ready to burn with shame. The most innocuous flaw was cross-coding and the inability of most popular browsers to contemplate our site and system (although now this problem periodically makes itself felt).
The only one we had was a team of good programmers from the Iris Company . But, they were not developers and could not give us the final product that we needed. We have become developers ourselves. The tasks that were set for the guys from Iris were performed at lightning speed and for a very moderate reward (in my opinion, I have to drink them until the end of the world). Many flaws and deficiencies that we have corrected, prompted by our users.

Bug work:

First of all, we added a number of sections on the start page of our site :
"System News" ;
"Lawyer's Tips" ;
"Lawyer's stories" ;
"Useful standards . "
For the convenience of visitors (readers) of the "Lawyers' Tips" section added a tag cloud.

In parallel with this, we began to remove our mistakes in the user's personal account and simplify the process of working in the system.

In the section “Help” they added a small clip “How to work in the system”, since the overwhelming majority of users do not read this section and begin to get acquainted with the system “at random” (you can’t go against the mentality).

It was agreed with the lawyers that consultations that do not require special labor costs will be provided absolutely free of charge. The main focus of the legal assistance work will be the preparation of Cases of Trustees (users of the system), incl. and judicial, "turnkey fine finish". We began to prepare any legal documents and transfer to the Principal, in such a way that he can only print the document, put his signature on it and the receipt for the payment of state. duties (in the case of preparation of the court case), send the Russian Post to the addressee. After the completion of the Order, at the request of the Principal, all information was deleted from the system, incl. and materials received by us during the execution of the Order. In cases where the Principal wishes to attribute to our court costs the payment of our assistance, we will send him the originals of all documents that confirm our legal relationship with him (Contract, invoice, certificate of completion, receipt).

Success, which we did not expect:

We have always been skeptical of distance justice, especially in the courts of general jurisdiction.
But when the first ten court cases that we prepared for the users of the system ended as soon as possible with the issuance of positive Decisions and Executive Lists, we were very surprised. All cases were reviewed by the courts in the absence of our principals. We brought several arbitration disputes remotely to the Supreme Arbitration Court of the Russian Federation.
To date, the registered number of users exceeds 8,000 people.
Regular active users more than 2000 people. Offline so much I can not boast.
On the number of consultations and prepared court cases ... I will keep silent :-).

In conclusion, I would like to thank for the support of our users, as well as personally the project “Non-nefigism” and personally its leader Vladimir Belyaev, who became our Partners and good friends.