Egyptian Startup Mohamy Connects User with Lawyers in Virtual Offices

As more and more industries rely on technology to reach new customers, expand their offerings and streamline their processes, some professions are being left behind. One such archaic industry is the legal industry which, for centuries, has relied on face-to-face interaction. Often, the top lawyers are difficult to reach, and when you reach them you might wait weeks or months for an appointment. Hoping to change that, however, is the newly launched Mohamy.co - an Egyptian tech-enabled startup that takes the whole process online. “The idea of democratising the legal industry has always been on my mind. The implementation, however, of this idea in a viable, scalable manner was the most crucial issue,” founder Mohamed Gamaleldin says to StartupScene.

Mohamy.co allows users seeking consultations and legal advice to search through a curated database of top lawyers across Egypt and filter by speciality and ratings, before booking a virtual consultation as the platform connects both parties via video call. “Our current business model came from closely observing what tech giants across different industries were doing to provide their respective services to the masses. The business model of one in particular operating in healthtech, Doctors on Demand, felt just right. For the first time, the rosy idea of making the law accessible to the masses could become a reality,” says Gamaleldin, a Sorbonne law graduate. “Of course we cloned other successful business models of other global legaltech startups such as Rocketlawyer, Legalzoom and Axiom and tailored them to fit our industry and our target markets’ needs.”

Thus, Mohamy.co is a simple and increasingly recognisable model. “By looking closely at the data and realising that millions of people worldwide were already adapting to this model, such as seeking healthcare through video based consultations. I knew that, soon enough, this will be implemented in different industries globally. So what better industry to implement this than the one I'm most passionate about?” says Gamaleldin who has spotted a gap in the increasingly tech-savvy MENA markets. “The irony is that the legal industry is a critical one, on which we all rely on, but it’s stuck in its centuries-old traditions and thus remains to be one of the worst tech-enabled industries. People operating in the legal industry have made little-to-no progress in making people's lives easier, at least in the Middle East.” 

Automating and digitsing the entire legal consultation process, through detailed search and comparison, and taking face-to-face meetings online, makes lawyers and legal advice more affordable and accessible for more people . “Through this virtual office, clients can get the exact same consultation but with a much more enhanced experience; less wasted time and less money spent,” says GamelEldin. Mohamy.co also provides legal services such as registering new businesses, transferring real estate, notarising contracts and other day-to-day legal matters. “We've automated the full process. Let’s say a startup wants to incorporate their idea into a company. The process would be very simple: they access the platform, pick which service they need, and start comparing which lawyer they want for this specific service, based on ratings, reviews, price and years of experience. Once they've made up their mind, they can pay the first installment for the service, and sit back and track the progress until it's complete.”

As for the lawyers on the Mohamy.co, GamelElDin and his team quickly found out that they’ve been sorely lacking a platform like this to add to their offerings. “Onboarding lawyers, in principle, is very easy to do. One of the most common phrases we heard when approaching different lawyers was ‘I have been waiting for something like this for a very long time.’ But what we do is much more complex; our lawyers are highly curated, trained and professional. This is where it gets tricky. We don't just onboard lawyers, that's easy to do. Instead, we cherry pick,  train and manage them. We believe that having quality is much more scalable on the long run than acquiring hundreds of lawyers to start with. 

While many industries are suffering slowdowns as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, Mohamy.co seems to be well suited to cope.“After understanding the ease and simplicity of the platform, traditional consultations don't make sense anymore for our targeted segments.I always like to stress on the fact that we are not reinventing the wheel here,” stresses GamelEldin. “We carefully observed what the other more advanced parts of the world were doing and tailored it to our needs here in the Middle East. We strongly believe that COVID-19 will have everlasting impacts on user behavior. Entire industries are becoming digitised and consumers are very quick to notice the efficiency of such online services.”