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LawPal was an amazing journey for everyone involved which sadly did not work out. I've yet to write about the evolution of the company but here goes...Here is my personal experience of the 3 main stages of the company.1. Document AssemblyThe original idea for LawPal was a document assembly service that would give consumers access to a wide range of largely commoditized legal documents for free. Similar to the document assembly UXs employed by Legal Zoom and Rocketlawyer, LawPal would allow users to quickly spin off a wide range of documents, execute them online and then buy related services. Our hypothesis was that the creation of legal documents usually coincides with major life events and people could be upsold related services including financial products.We built a rough prototype of this system and began to seek out quality content (forms). It became increasingly clear that the primary market for free forms were not people who were currently using lawyers but rather people that were currently not doing anything at all. We came to the conclusion that this was a particularly difficult audience to build a business around and a pivot was required. The output of this Q&A process was particularly poor and often left the consumer in a worse position than doing nothing at all. (Shake legal has executed well on this idea)2. Startup Legal Services MarketplaceThe idea we moved to (and launched) was a match making and workflow platform for startups and their attorneys. Startups would come to LawPal, fill out a short on-boarding questionnaire and then either pick a pre-priced legal service if eligible (formation, seed etc) or get a custom quote. They would then be given a range of lawyers to pick from. Once matched, we would introduce efficiencies in the attorney-client relationship by helping them work online through a transaction checklist (a list of documents required to complete the deal).This was interesting. We matched a range of startups with legal council and were successful in both getting them great fixed fees on their initial work and helping them work (a little bit) more efficiently. (Horribly difficult to monetize due to fee splitting regs).Problems arose on two main fronts. The first was that larger firms were deferring fees for initial legal work to win clients. Founders time and time again were not seeing this credit line as a real expense as it would be called in at a time in the future when (they thought) everything would be rainbows and kittens and they could pay it with the swipe of a pen (or not at all). Experienced founders were the exception here. The lure of big firms with shiny offices also played a part here. Big firms would offer introductions to angel investors but as an inexperienced valley angel pointed out, an introduction from a lawyer is quite often one of the weakest for an early stage company and this offer rarely comes good (there are exceptions!).The second was that whilst we were fixing the fees for legal work, the scope of work would invariably change (undisclosed agreements, founder changes etc) and this would frustrate the relationship. The Uber for Law model we were trying to create (sorry - a cliché i know) was not just not sympathetic to the realities of the legal consumer/supplier dynamic.3. Trello for LawWe liked the efficiency part of the business more than the match making piece and decided to double down on that. I traveled to a small town in Germany and my co-founder Ross and I hammered out a revised version of the platform that removed the matchmaking piece of offering and focus on the efficiency part. We launched at the 2014 ABA tech show in chicago.The idea was traffic control for legal documents, a layer top of cloud storage/DMS. From client intake to internal draft to client review and eventual execution, LawPal would give everyone involved in the transaction visibility on their piece and tasks they needed to complete (review this, sign this etc).It was a really nice piece of software. Clean, fast - for the technically minded a Django backend with an AngularJS gui on the front. It integrated with crocodoc's document annotation tools and hellosign.The product launched, gained a little traction and a lot of feedback but ultimately not enough to sustain a viable business. We closed end of 2014. There were a few factors that contributed to it's closing :1. Email - I can't overstate this: Lawyers live in email and despite doing deeper and deeper integration into email clients we failed to ween them off this habit. If a client wants to reach their lawyer, they are going to ping them in an email, not use a platform, no matter how elegant. We contemplated getting really sophisticated and giving lawyers LawPal integrated email addresses but it felt like a unchangeable behavior (i'm sure this will eventually change).2. Team Fatigue - Founders are supposed to be superhuman but sometimes it's just really hard to carry on with something when there is hardly any traction. At the end of this third iteration we decided to call it a day. We couldn't, hand on heart, go back to investors for more money. I've had enough things work and enough to fail to know when there is a future in a project.3. The small firm//big firm casm - We found that buying behavior and mindset of big firms and small firms were totally different and there wasn't a whole lot in between. Small firms didn't (usually) view their time as a cost so efficiency was less important. They were primarily interested in attaining new business over executing existing business in less time. Big firms were interested in efficiency but had a very slow buying cycle. They also required integration with a plethora of legacy IT systems and sent us checklists of requirements for IT they were going to aquire.I remember sitting in a meeting at a top 5 valley law firm. We demo'd a lawyer at this firm the LawPal platform. He said, "i love it, this would save us a heap of time, but we'll never be able to use it". He looked defeated. As someone that has worked in startups all my life, the idea of wanting to adopt something but being held back by red tape and institutional convention was foreign. My co-founder Yael remembers the perplexed look on my face.4. Naivity - We wandered into a monster of a problem and in hindsight were pretty ill equipped to take it on. Crazy people are often the ones that solve crazy big problems but the risk is high and success is often elusive.What's next?We are considering open sourcing the LawPal V3 platform. It would be nice for the codebase to be put to use. I think that big law will continue to make "we're evolving!" noises but little will change for a while. Clients will pull lawyers to use more efficient tools as they did with Blackberrys in the 90s. True legal automation is really much further away than Richard Suskind will lead you to believe but that's not a technological issue, is a cultural one. Small firms will use Clio and co but the bulk of solo IT adoption will be in generic products like Trello, dropbox, box and co. Small firm legal specific IT is not going to set the world on fire - i'll leave that for a separate post.As a side note, I learnt a valuable personal lesson in this journey - i need to work in space that still inspires me at 2am on Friday morning when i'm debugging code. Law was perhaps a bit too foreign for me. I have recently joined the Product team at Teespring, a company that is revolutionizing a whole category of ecommerce, it's a lot of fun, fast moving and much less serious subject matter. The LawPal experience was an amazing one and i'm truly grateful to those who supported us and to my co-founders who i hope to work with again some day.

“Can a psychiatrist tell if someone is bipolar after a 1 hour intake session? Saw a new psychiatrist today and she wants to treat me for bipolar 2. How can she tell after only an hour of knowing me?”I can understand how this can feel offensive and judgemental. Let me tell you something that will help you to understand the process. The psychiatrist is required by the insurance companies or the funding source to assign you a diagnosis. It is part of the paperwork process. If your therapist, psychologist, counselor, social worker, or psychiatrist does not assign a diagnosis to you, they cannot bill the insurance company for your visit. Yes, me, a lowly master degreed social worker, used to assign a diagnosis to people. In our clinic we had a psychiatrist for a couple of half days a week, so he or she would read my write-up and either sign off on my diagnostic suggestion, or tell me another. None of mine were ever changed. I considered it my job to really interview the client well, then write up a history that told the psychiatrist about the person’s life and current symptoms that would demonstrate why I chose the diagnosis I had. Our clinic also had a more experienced therapist who served as our clinical supervisor, and she also read and signed off on our intake paperwork and its updates.As others have discussed, a psychiatrist has experience in seeing people with different disorders and can recognize the symptoms he sees. But he has also interviewed you about your symptoms If you were seen in a clinic like mine was, your therapist wrote up an intake report that the psychiatrist may have read before seeing you.In any case, your diagnosis is just a classification system to help us communicate about what is going on with you. Decades ago, the psychiatrists formed committees that got together to make up a classification system. They churned out the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. The manual has been revised four times. So all you have to do is Google “DSM Bipolar II symptoms” to learn what the list of symptoms they were pulling from when they made your diagnosis. Feel free to look and see and compare your symptoms.Any initial diagnosis is really a provisional diagnosis. Your mental health professional can change it at any time as they work with you. It does not matter, really. It is all just a classification system. A hundred years from now, we might not even recognize the classification system in use.

Easiest way to get a Rank:a) Give an average performanceb) Expect everyone else to perform below averageThe regular path:It’s time to reflect a bit and remember the day you signed up for the CA course - that first step you took by filling up the CPT form. You have come a long way from there - rather are just a step away from the coveted CA tag. Forget the attempts you took to get through CPT or IPCC (if any), forget the long working hours and the annoying seniors/ principal, forget the heart breaks, forget the missed weddings, dinners and vacations, forget the long lecture hours - forget all the negatives but remember the extra attention you commanded in the client office - being called Sir, asked for tea and food at regular intervals, the proud feeling of clearing IPCC and taking the first step at articleship and remember the decision you took to take up this grueling 3+ years of course which many of your friends just wrote of as a ‘difficult’ course. You have passed the test of time and are here knocking on the doors of ICAI to become a ‘Chartered Accountant’.For some of us its a passion, for some our parents dream and for rest of us it could be just a professional degree but for ALL of us now it’s a matter of pride to prove ourselves.We all have different reasons to be pursuing CA. Even the struggle could be different. The long working hours to staying away from family in a new city to the financial constraints. Surviving all odds we have reached closer to the exam dates. All these moments would be the stories to the future generation because all that matters at the end of the day are the two initials ‘CA’ in front of your name.First things First. Stop pitying yourself.Never say that you have studied enough for the day because enough is never enough. The CA Final portion is just never ending and the more you study the more you’ll realise is left out. Does that bother you? Stop spending time wondering when and how you’ll refer all those millions of pages. Just get to work. Be a smart student and not a hard working student.In the last lap to the exams, avoid any unwarranted external influences. Some basic points to remember:Refer only 1 book per subject throughout. Ignore when a friend says that so and so topic or illustration is missing. Every book will have its imperfections. That one book of your choice should be your bible. No second thoughts.Do refer to the practice manuals and the past papers. RTP’s is an absolute must.Don’t spend time comparing what your friends are studying. All of you are different individuals with different capacities and potential. Keep just one or two buddies to discuss your preparation. Ensure these are positive influences and keep motivating each other.Spend time studying rather than revising the schedule. Also don’t take up a new topic to study/ understand in the last month of the exam. Just double your efforts in prayers that the topic is not asked or you can leave it in option.Try to have atleast two rounds of revision per subject. Start referring the material atleast 1.5 years before the exam month especially if you have not taken coaching. Don’t wait for leave from office. Stay in touch with the subject throughout and atleast one reading/ reference before the exam leaves commence.Avoid moving out of your comfort zone. Don’t experiment with your study room, sleeping habit and food intake. No unwanted red bull or caffeine.Staying away from FB and whatsapp would help. But don’t alienate yourself from the external world. Don’t seclude yourself behind closed doors. Have fun while studying but know where to draw a line.There is no shortcut to success. Similarly there is no guaranteed success formula. What may work for you may not work for your friend. Number of learning hours doesn’t define success. Effective learning helps which could be 6 or 12. Don’t overdo. It is OKAY to drop the books for a day and catch up on a movie or drinks.You do not become a CA by losing the battle. Don’t give up at any point in time. There will be tough times during your study schedule. There will be moments when you’ll feel that you don’t remember anything. Doesn’t matter keep studying. You’ll remember everything in the exam hall. Eventually it’s those 3 hours that will define history.Those 4 odd months of study leave is all you have to make or break. And of course the 15 exam days and 3 hours of exam. These will decide your fate and nobody can take them away from you. Let’s not think we have another attempt because probably you don’t. Be confident like you have never lost and work hard as if you have never won.And mind it, even after becoming a CA few months down the line - Life has just begun my friends.All the Best.P.S: If you’re probably still wondering how to get a Rank, scroll up and re-read.