This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, LawSikho.
What would happen if you begin to give your clients or employer much more than what they expect from you?
You stand out. You become remarkable. That’s one way to become a brand.
Let me give you an example. When I started ClikLawyer, I introduced something a little unusual. We specialised in money recovery. We did a business model tweak.
We said for the money recovery assignments we take up, as a company, we would take 3% of recoverables upfront. And then we will take certain pre-determined and defined steps to recover the money. If we manage to recover, we get paid another 7%. We paid the lawyers we then engaged from our pockets and dictated the strategy and tightly managed quality of work.
Those of you screaming at this point that this is illegal, you need to read up. This is very much legal, and this is exactly how third party funding works today.
It worked wonders. In 7 months we went from 0-8 lakhs per month in revenue, at which point I shut it down for personal reasons.
What succeeded? Clients did not expect someone to take responsibility for the outcome of their cases and get remunerated on the basis of results. It is something that most lawyers would resist. Also, it would be illegal for a lawyer to do it, which is why I set up a company to take the assignments first.
Anyway, we went beyond the standard expectations. And it worked like wildfire.
In LawSikho, we do it all the time. Breaking patterns and exceeding expectations is pretty much how we have become the leaders in this industry.
We started charging 20,000 for online courses when our competitors were offering a whole library of courses for Rs. 1000. So we had to deliver much more value than the market was used to.
We introduced live video classes. We introduced weekly exercises and personal feedback for every learner. When we did this, the industry thought we are mad, because personal feedback doesn’t scale!
We, on the other hand, said may as well it be, we must do it. How else can we train lawyers to do better work if we don’t give personal feedback?
Yes that means we had to hire and train an army of lawyers to be evaluators. But it’s worth doing that rather than just giving users a bunch of videos to watch, text to read and an exam at the end.
We went the extra mile to make our courses interactive. The rest of the industry is yet to catch up. Not even the biggest universities have managed to crack it yet.
There are other ways in which we tried to exceed expectations too. We are the only player in online legal education that gives you a money back guarantee. You can use our course for full one month and then get your entire money back if you did not like it. Here is the link of the refund policy.
Were we scared before launching it? Sure we were. But till date, only 3 people who qualified for it asked for a refund. Out of a few thousand!
We exceeded expectations with our Master Access program too. To understand how, you would have to go through this page.
There are other things we have tried and failed at. One of these is arranging formal finance options for students to buy our courses. It has not worked well at all. We would continue exploring other ways in which we can exceed your expectations.
However, we are always excited to break from the so called “normal”.
What could you do in your work to exceed expectations and break from the normal? How would it play out if you did? Please respond and let me know your thoughts.
Also, I would like to remind you that the following courses are closing in a few hours:
Executive Certificate Courses
Certificate Course in Legal Practice Development and Management
Certificate Course in Advanced Criminal Litigation & Trial Advocacy Certificate
Certificate Course in Consumer Litigation
Certificate Course in Trademark Licensing, Prosecution and Litigation
Certificate Course in Securities Appellate Tribunal (SAT) Litigation
Certificate Course in Companies Act
Certificate Course in Labour, Employment and Industrial Laws for HR Managers
Test Preparation
Judgment Writing and Drafting Course for Judicial Services
