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Two weeks ago, a Facebook post created and shared by Ram Subramaniam, head of innovation at the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), went viral. The post was of a hypothetical letter to the government describing a future in which citizens would be able to pool their resources in order to hire lawyers to represent them in court. The response to Ram’s photo was overwhelming: with over 2,300 likes in less than two weeks, it made the rounds on social media and eventually reached the three founders of Get Closer, a start-up that describes themselves as an “actionable Change.org.”
When the post went viral, Get Closer was working on officially launching its own pivot into becoming a crowdfunding website for lawyer fees. Founded in 2014 by Radhakrishnan Ram Manohar, Sidharth Vijayan and Praveen Paul, the start-up was originally created to help companies connect with relevant NGOs in order to comply with a newly introduced CSR act. With the decision to pivot, they had moved into an incubator at IIM Bangalore.
Because the small team, including Stalvart John, Abraham Varghese and Krishna Kumar, had already established a network of lawyers that were willing to work with the platform, the assumption was that most of the difficulty would lie in getting individuals to post cases and contribute funds. Thanks to the popularity of Ram’s post, however, this task became much easier.
While the platform presents a practical solution to a complex problem, there are several issues that come with the territory of working with the judiciary system. If an issue seems biased towards an unfair cause, for example, will Get Closer still allow it to raise funds on their website?
This is an excerpt from Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here.
