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Strategies & Market Trends : India Coffee House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (7041)	9/21/1999 5:16:00 PM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12475

Draper Intl picks up a 51% stake in legal data website Lexsite. lexsite.com Govindraj Ethiraj MUMBAI 19 SEPTEMBER VENTURE capital firm Draper International has picked up a 51 per cent stake in Lexsite, the company that runs the country's first major Internet legal database, www.lexsite.com, for an undisclosed amount. The Small Industrial Development Bank of India (Sidbi) also has a one per cent stake in the company. The Lexsite website hosts a plethora of legal information that ranges from case laws, statutes, circulars and notifications to rules and guidelines, commentaries on direct taxes and laws pertaining to foreign exchange. Some of the tax cases date back to 1886. The website will progressively host information on banking and corporate laws (by December) and then civil and criminal law. Lexsite currently hosts 300,000 pages, 34,243 cases, 842 circulars, 155 forms and 67 tax treaties. "We will focus on the creation of content, community and services on the web for legal and accounting professionals and corporate users. We want to be a one-stop shop for legal information and services," Lexsite CEO Ananth Nayak, a lawyer-turned-software developer, told The Economic Times. Lexsite will aim for a 20 per cent share of eyeballs in the roughly half a million Indian community of lawyers, accountants and tax experts in two years and 40 per cent a year later. The website provides, in addition to its database, news and developments in the legal world. "A visitor to Lexsite can research through the Lexsite.com library, get new developments in law, find lawyers in their region and explore nation-wide recruitment opportunities in the legal industry," Mr Nayak said. Lexsite will soon develop reporting cells in various courts to collect judgements. "Going forward, when a case law is delivered in Gujarat, this should be on your computer in hours," said Mr Nayak. According to Mr Nayak, the idea for a legal website was born when he and his colleagues found that the legal industry was least touched by technology. "We started off with a client asking us to convert his books into electronic form. Then we were onto interactive CD-Roms. That's when we realised that there was a bigger future to this," he said. Mr Nayak said, Lexsite was the first such database in the country. "Websites of some of the law firms do provide some information but there is nothing as exhaustive as this," he said. Lexsite will also have regular columns by well-known tax experts, such as HP Ranina. In the future, Mr Nayak said, Lexsite was looking at a revenue model based possibly on subscription or value-added services for the legal community. Lexsite's co-promoter is Vivek Hurry, chief operating officer. The technology for the database is from US-based Folio Inc, a leader in back-end databases for text materials, Mr Nayak said.