Success Stories From the Baltic HR&ED Tech Accelerator: Besavvy
Baltic HR&ED Tech Accelerator continues the acceleration program for HR-Tech and Ed-Tech talents. Throughout the 8-week program period, we will be sharing the interviews with participating startups that not only present their concept but also share the ambitious plans for the future.
This week is dedicated to the product, tech, partnerships & integration disciplines. Also, it is highlighted by the story of Besavvy, an e-learning&knowledge management platform for the legal industry.
We had a blast talking with Mikhail Kochkin, the CEO of this ed-tech startup, who explained how Besavvy brings the necessary solution for old-fashioned law teaching processes. Have a glance at how lawyers are being taught in the remote age!
How did you come up with the idea of Besavvy?
The journey of the Besavvy creation began when I worked in two of the world’s biggest law firms such as Baker McKenzie and Latham & Watkins.
The people around me were great experts but talking to them was not enough. Trainee lawyers need a place to practice without the fear to screw up a big project. Like when you write a computer program and can test it before putting it into production. We did not have it, and it caused a lot of stress. That is when I thought about building a platform where lawyers of all levels could practice their skills and get personalized feedback.
A brief summary of the market you work in
We work in the education technology market, which has been developing rapidly around the world. Although education is the main tool to succeed in the 21st century, many educational programs remain boring, obsolete, and inefficient.
However, ed-tech companies usually target the fanciest sectors such as coding, design, foreign languages, STEM subjects, etc. Legal ed-tech is still a much-neglected topic. Very few innovative companies emerge in this sector. Are you guessing why?
Legal training has unique features that make it hard to scale. First of all, it is very fragmented. Secondly, the law is different in every country, and it changes all the time. For the mentioned reasons, shooting a video is not a great solution, and it will become obsolete in a couple of months.
As a result, we have a large legal education market, for example, there are 2.5 million lawyers in Europe, and in this market, most of the other ed-tech solutions do not work. That is why it is important and necessary to provide companies with such a solution that opens fantastic opportunities.
Competitive advantages of Besavvy
Lawyers are trained in a very old-fashioned way. First things first, lawyers are trained in a very old-fashioned way. Let’s just imagine going to the classroom, listening to an expert, who delivers a lecture on a very complex topic, and probably if we have enough time, we will have a Q&A session. And do not get me wrong — it is a great way to learn, but this is not an all-in-one solution.
It cannot work in the age of remote work when everyone is even more under pressure with the workflow and time management. For this reason, we designed a solution that fits teams that work remotely. We make legal e-training more data-driven, personalized, simultaneous time, and cost-effective.
The ambitious advantage of Besavvy is that our competitors in Russia and Europe do not target this exact problem of the legal industry yet.
Tell us about your team and how did you meet?
I, Mikhail, and my partner Alexander have been long involved in the Russian legal tech and ed-tech movement.
Also, we have participated in an ed-tech tournament together with our separate projects at that time. After the tournament, we started talking and quickly understood that we can do way more by working together instead of competing with each other.
Additionally, we had a very complementary set of skills. I was good at launching online projects and designing learning programs. Alexander was great at networking, business development, and B2B sales.
Share your favorite story related to your customers
50% of our team members consist of people who completed one of our programs. They liked our approach so much that they later joined the team as authors to create their own training products.
Our latest story is about Lev. He was one of our first students on a Legal English program that we designed with one of the prominent law firms. The program helped him get a trainee contract with the law firm he dreamed about. After gaining experience and advancing his career Lev returned to us and agreed to launch an M/A course for junior lawyers.
Where do you see Besavvy in five years?
People say in order to succeed you need to become either a media company that everybody knows or a tech company that has 10x better tech than anyone else. In a period of 5 years, we want to become both.
This goal defines our strategy. We need to focus on making our education technology perfect for lawyers. It should be practice-oriented, engaging, and providing thorough feedback. At the same time, we need to have the best partners such as scholars, law firms, enterprises.
Can you name your biggest struggle at the moment?
Probably, the second part of our previously mentioned goal is quite challenging. If we want to work with the best, we need to gain credibility. For this reason, it is extremely important to find our first big clients and partners that will boost our growth: prominent law firms, legal departments of international companies, universities. That is what we are working on right now.
