Jusfy: digitizing Brazil's lawyers
Jusfy is building a SaaS for Brazil's 1M+ lawyers.
Biography:
Rafael Bagolin is the founder of Jusfy, one of Brazil’s fastest growing legaltech SaaS startups.
Jusfy’s product includes legal calculators, case tracking, legal research, streamlined workflows and more. Founded in 2021, Jusfy closed a $5.5M round and does around $400,000 in MRR.
Prior to Jusfy, Rafael was a lawyer himself, grappling with many of the issues Jusfy is now solving.
What did your MVP look like?
I was a lawyer for over 10 years. A big pain for Brazilian lawyers is legal calculations: before you enter a lawsuit, you have to show the judge how much money you believe your client is entitled to.
That calculation is a labyrinth. You have to factor in inflation, for which there are 50 different indexes to choose from. Brazil has 93 law codes, so you have to choose the right one and adapt your calculation accordingly. For some calculations, lawyers need to hire an accountant, and the lawsuit hasn’t even started.
That’s only the beginning of the math nightmare: once the case is closed, you need to dive back into the numbers, subtract your fees, review if inflation was as you predicted, before disbursing the final compensation to your client.
There were no tools for lawyers to do this. Since lawyers relied on accountants, existing tools were accountant-facing and unadapted to lawyers.
I had a case where I paid $6K for an accountant. I started looking for another solution. Serendipitously, I met Juliano (now my co-founder) at an event. Juliano is a developer.
Juliano created a calculator for me, which I put on my website for myself and some lawyer friends to use. One day, Juliano warned me that the tool’s AWS bill had exploded from $20 to $300. When he showed me the Google Analytics page, 142 people were using the calculator, live, across Brazil.
I removed the calculator from the website, because I didn’t see why I’d pay for other lawyers to use it. Then, lawyers from around the country started calling, begging me to re-upload it. They said they would pay to access it. That’s when I knew I was onto something.
Brazil has an insane amount of lawyers, making Jusfy’s market large. Why is that the case?
There are over 1 million lawyers in Brazil. In 2023, there were around 84 million cases pending. These statistics often blow foreign VCs away. In my opinion, multiple factors contribute to this.
First, Brazilian society values a public sector career as the pinnacle of success. A law degree is the golden ticket to attain that.
Second, during Lula’s (Brazil’s current president) first term in 2002, there was a push to open universities in the countryside. Law was the cheapest course to teach: you only need a teacher and a book. As a result, law degrees proliferated. The town where I live has nine law universities for a population of 400,000!
Third, the Brazilian constitution grants citizens easy access to the law system: in other words, people have a right to sue for whatever they deem relevant, so they sue en masse. Contrary to other countries where parties might reach a consensus before entering a lawsuit, Brazilians just sue directly. This leads to a ballooning number of lawsuits and as a result, a large need for lawyers.
Source: BBC
What are Jusfy’s major features today?
We started with various legal calculators, like the one I described earlier. Now, we’re a one-stop shop for Brazilian lawyers, offering more than 10 legal tools under a single subscription.
These include a search engine for lawyers to find relevant public information for their case, a tool where lawyers get live updates on their case and obviously, a suite of different calculators adapted to different lawsuits.
We’ve also launched a marketplace for lawyers to find clients. Lawyers are banned from running ads in Brazil, so young lawyers rely on recommendations. But how do you get recommendations when you’ve barely started? Our marketplace acts as a sort of “Uber for lawyers” if you will.
How has AI changed your product?
Jusfy’s vision is to become lawyers’ co-pilot. The ungodly amount of documents and information lawyers have to sift through makes AI particularly adapted to our product. We’re building an internal AI chatbot, fed with millions of Brazilian lawsuits. During the pandemic, the Brazilian judiciary digitized all 93 law codes, so we’ve plugged those into our AI.
Today, our AI can give lawyers updates on their cases, provide advice, inform them of the deadlines they have to file a certain petition… In the future, our AI will be able to pre-draft documents tailored to the lawyer’s case.
RO insights: AI for edtech startups
AI doesn’t benefit all startups equally. But there are certain sectors where AI’s capacity to ingest, decipher and re-contextualize large amounts of data is undoubtedly powerful. Legaltech is one of those sectors. Edtech is another one.
Here’s how Hamdi Tabbaa, co-founder of Jordanian edtech Abwaab, explains how they’ve plugged AI into their product:
“That topic has taken a much higher priority since ChatGPT’s grand release. AI is an exceptional opportunity to hyper-personalize students’ learning journey. There are a few use cases we’re exploring.
One of them would be AI explaining a wrong answer to a student. AI could adapt that explanation depending on the student’s age and the mistakes they made prior. We have a BETA product that instantly grades essays, something we couldn’t scalably do before AI.
This excites me immensely. We’re entering an era where elite education will cease being an elitist product. Before, you could only learn from the best teachers if you could attend the best schools, which implied high socio-economic status. Soon, everyone could have access to the best teacher, bespoke to them, in their pockets.”
Excerpt from Abwaab: democratizing learning in MENA, originally published in The Realistic Optimist
Supposedly, lawyers are one of the professions most threatened by AI. Thoughts?