Wokanda.net – an answer to the corner the legal services market has painted itself into.
A market at a turning point
The way court appearance cover – sending a colleague to a hearing in your place – is arranged and paid for in Poland is a perfect picture of the corner our legal services market has turned into.
This is a market of people who consider themselves (fair warning: I am about to be ironic about my own profession) rational and cautious – and, naturally, the smartest people alive – while handing out appearance cover through random Facebook groups and settling up over chat with instant phone transfers.
This is a market of people who boast about the AI tools they have rolled out in the firm, and then are afraid to register – in order to be guaranteed payment – and hand their details to a licensed payment institution, because after all you never know… and who then post tearful complaints on Facebook about „not being paid on time”.
The end of selling knowledge
And finally, this is a market of experts who have not noticed that you can no longer make a living selling knowledge and reciting statutes from memory. AI is better at that.
What sells from now on is skills and actions. Knowledge is still needed for that – but no longer as the key component.
It started in a courthouse corridor in Łódź
Wokanda.net is an answer to these problems – one that was born in the corridor of the District Court in Łódź, where I was desperately combing through Facebook groups looking for someone to cover a hearing the next day, somewhere up in Pomerania.
You can see more about what wokanda.net is and why it exists here.
This is about far more than appearance cover
But what we are really after goes well beyond the market for court appearance cover – in Poland, in Germany and in other EU countries, where we intend to launch wokanda.net as well.
Our goal is to create a closed, clearly defined standard for commissioning, delivering and settling low-value legal services. The same standard on wokanda.net in Germany, Switzerland and Poland alike.
These are precisely the instructions there are most of – and the ones that most often fail to find a lawyer willing to take them on and carry them out.
The other side of the barricade
Seen from the other side of the barricade, these are exactly the services an ordinary citizen needs most to protect their rights – and, at the same time, the ones that fit within their budget.
When there is no space for these two perspectives to meet – the advocate or legal counsel on one side, the person who needs legal help on the other – it is the second one who loses most, and who often ends up with no effective help at all.
Clear communication as an invitation
Why is that so? The barriers to genuinely accessible, effective legal help could be debated at length. That is a subject for a separate article.
One thing, however, is certain: communication defined from A to Z and understandable to both sides is itself an invitation to enter into a business relationship – and to deliver a concrete, precisely defined and priced legal service.
How does it work in practice? See for yourself at wokanda.net.