It was humid summer afternoon in 2017, when two friends decided to catch up at a Starbucks in Gurgaon. Little did they know, that their conversation would put them on a journey to revolutionize the legal industry. Tushar Bhargava, a lawyer specializing in IP Law, was struggling with the mundane tasks he was required to perform daily (none of which required him to exercise his expertise in law) Anshul Gupta, a solution-oriented entrepreneur, was quick to identify a potential opportunity. Amidst sharing their hardships and experiences that evening, Tushar and Anshul conceptualized MikeLegal, a company, that would go on to focus on delivering easy-to-use technological solutions to automate excruciatingly mundane day-to-day tasks for attorneys at law firms and corporates.

The Indian legal industry is highly fragmented and competitive with abundant well-reputed players and talented new entrants. The legal market in India has been growing at a steady pace over the past decade. With fierce competition, existing players struggle with the pressure to continually onboard new clients, nurture attorney-client relationships and deliver high-quality products despite the stringent (and even unreasonable) deadlines of clients, which invariably overall drive-up costs. The legal industry has historically been lagging behind, compared to the other industries, in adopting disruptive technologies and solutions. However, over the past few years, this has changed. High operating costs and increased competition has forced attorneys across law firms and corporate organizations to adopt and leverage efficiency promoting technology to gain an edge over their competitors and continually deliver high quality products.

Studies demonstrate that attorneys, spend over 35% of their time on nonbillable activities. These activities inter alia include reviewing the weekly trademark journal to identifying potential infringements, managing trademark application deadlines and proof-reading and formatting contracts. Our team’s further research on the subject found that junior members of legal teams across India spend approximately 30 hours perusing the trademark journal and 10 hours a week on proof-reading contracts! MikeLegal set out to ease this tremendous loss of productivity.

MikeLegal started by developing MikeIP Suite consisting of: (i) MikeTM Search: a solution that uses advanced AI algorithms to execute public search across all 45 classes and by exploring multiple permutations allowing for better identification of availability of marks. MikeTM Search empowers users to also conduct a proprietor search and identify all marks filed by a particular proprietor which otherwise is impossible to identify for attorneys today; (ii) MikeTM Watch: Automates the weekly journal watch analysis considerably reducing the time spent by attorneys in identifying potential infringements from the weekly trademark journal and also identifying over 30% more infringements using the advanced algorithm. This results in faster infringement analysis for corporates and augments revenue generation for law firms; and (iii) MikeTM Manager: Allows brand owner, corporates and law firms to stay updated with changes in application status, pending renewals and pending replies by opting for detailed email notifications triggered every minor change in their IP Portfolios. This tool empowers attorneys to organize their portfolio and ensures that all stakeholders are aware of the developments to their portfolio.

MikeLegal has recently forayed into building solutions around the contract drafting process and has launched India’s first AI powered contract proof-reading solution Mike DocuSieve which helps legal teams draft higher quality contracts in significantly less time by automating the reviewing process which currently is done manually. Before legal teams needed to go through the contract multiple times to review for cross referencing issues, amount inconsistencies, definitions issues, to name a few but with Mike DocuSieve, they can do it in minutes. Furthermore, they are in a position to give faster and better client service while optimizing their billable to non-billable ratio. The solution is a Microsoft Word Add-in offering quick onboarding process coupled with ease of installation and extremely high accuracy.

Since its inception, MikeLegal has been adopted by Tier-1 IP law firms like Anand and Anand, Chadha and Chadha, Saikrishna and Associates, Altacit Global, and corporates like Reliance Industries Limited, Glenmark Pharmaceuticals, Hero MotoCorp, Airtel and Sun Pharmaceuticals, to name a few. All these organisations have improved their efficiency while performing tasks ranging from checking the availability of mark to managing deadlines and identifying potential infringements.

In a case study conducted by MikeLegal with Chadha and Chadha, IP Attorneys who have been early adopters of the Mike IP Suite solutions, it was found that the leading IP firm was able to save up to 50% of their time while seeing increase in efficiency by up to 70%, directly impacting their billable to non-billable ratios and allowing them to optimise client servicing.

The future of legal tech is bright and legal teams of the future would be powered by technology and MikeLegal aims to be at the forefront of this change.