Being a lawyer in the age of tablets and smartphones is a totally different thing from being one in the age of typewriters and carbon paper. Everything has to be accessed quickly for a speedy but accurate and concise reply to client. Gone are the days when we as lawyers had the luxury of telling client, "I'll go back to my office and do the necessary research".
Today, the Filipino Lawyer can resort to MY Legal Whiz (MLW), a smartphone app that attempts to revolutionize how legal research is done. MY Legal Whiz is founded by Dexter Feliciano and Katrina Chua. Feliciano, a graduate of DLSU-FEU, Masters in Business Administration-Juris Doctor (MBA-JD) Program says, “This is professional legal research on the go. We envision a web and mobile resource for legal research that is available anytime, anywhere. While there are other products currently available in print, on CD or on the web, My Legal Whiz uniquely curates, annotates and organizes the content so users need not swim through thousands of entries to find the few genuinely pertinent rulings, cases or doctrines.”
Feliciano continues that Mylegalwhiz’ unique proposition is in its curated content. “Our unique value is the curated and annotated legal content (legal encyclopedia) that’s constantly updated based on our customer’s feedback, inputs and search behaviors.” Additionally, Mylegalwhiz includes “a whole suite of features that other content providers don’t have, like ‘my library,’ ‘notes,’ and filtered keywords that are linked to cases that actually discuss it.”
Co-founder Chua, another graduate of DLSU-FEU MBA-JD Program explains how cloud computing not only improves accessibility for users, it also broadens the reach to a wider group of lawyers. The resource provided by MY Legal Whiz is a subscription-based knowledge-base that is accessible from the web or from a mobile device.
Mylegalwhiz was launched in 2012, but has actually been in the works four years prior. Dexter started compiling content in 2008 while still in law and MBA school. “I started envisioning a digital law office with a lot of features. But I learned that it was hard to release it after testing the concept. A lot of people like the research but did not really understand the whole ‘digital’ law office concept at that time. So I changed my strategy and focused first on legal research–which is really the ‘heart of the product.” Dexter then invited fellow lawyer and MBA graduate Katrina Chua to join the team.
It is now being offered by Globe Telecom myBusiness Mobile Postpaid and Internet Bundle. In this day and age of voluminous legal documents and rulings, not to mention the Senior Moments which also seem to pervade even the young lawyers, My Legal Whiz is the "exobrain" for the Millenial Filipino Lawyer.
