Shreya Vajpei built the community for legal tech in India. Now she's connecting that community with the rest of the world.

India has more legal tech startups than almost anywhere on earth.

I did not know this until I sat down with Shreya Vajpei, but India has around a thousand legal tech startups, which Shreya tells me puts it second only to the US and ahead of every other market, including the UK.

That is a striking number for a country where foreign law firms still can’t really practise, where only advocates can own law firms, and where the entire legal services market is about a fifth the size of the UK’s.

If there’s one person who can help us make sense of this landscape, it’s Shreya Vajpei.

Listen to the full episode on your favourite platform, or keep reading for the full write-up.

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Introducing Shreya

Shreya trained at Khaitan & Co, one of India’s tier one firms and roughly the magic circle equivalent in the Indian market, with around 800 lawyers when she joined and closer to twice that today.

Like many guests on Without Limitation, her career has taken an unconventional path. She practised for a couple of years before moving into a practice development role. Then, COVID hit and the marketing budget disappeared overnight, which meant her team ended up absorbing everything else the managing partner needed help with.

That covered IT, HR and operations, but also pricing, strategy, new office openings, partner performance and strategic hiring. In her words, whatever landed at the managing partner’s table also landed at theirs, which gave her something most lawyers never really get, which is a top-down view of a law firm as a business rather than a bottom-up view of a practice.

From there she became one of the first hires into Khaitan’s innovation team, and her role kept evolving as AI did.

Last year she moved to the UK to join Stephenson Harwood, drawn by what she described as a more mature market for digital transformation, with longer-established innovation teams, more consistent IT budgets, and a decade or so head start on the journey.

A thousand startups

Shreya tells me that India’s legal services market is around $10 to $15 billion in total, roughly a fifth the size of the UK’s, and it is wildly unconsolidated compared to what most of us are used to. The top five firms are similar in size to each other, in the 1,500 to 2,000 lawyer range, and then there is a big gap before you reach the long tail of full-service firms operating somewhere between 50 and 200 lawyers, and then the boutiques and independent chambers, and then a hyperlocal market across the tier two and tier three cities that operates almost entirely separately and accounts for the vast majority of India by population if not by revenue. On top of that, foreign firms still can’t really practise there, a liberalisation bill has been pending for years with significant local opposition, and there is no ABS or non-lawyer ownership of any kind.

So the obvious question is why a market with all of those constraints has produced so many startups, and Shreya’s answer is partly cultural, partly economic, and partly a story about talent.

India, she tells me, is generally entrepreneurial and high risk-taking, which feeds directly into the volume of founders willing to have a go, and it has some of the best developers in the world at cost structures that make building viable in a way that is hard to replicate elsewhere. The economics also push founders outward almost from day one, because rupee revenues are small once converted, so the dominant playbook is to build in India and sell internationally, which is exactly what companies like SpotDraft (now established in the US and entering Europe) and Lucio (which recently opened a New York office) have done.

One category worth flagging, because it is more advanced in India than most other places, is online dispute resolution (ODR). SEBI, the securities regulator, now requires all investor disputes to go through an ODR platform, and there is open API infrastructure called the Pulse Protocol that allows any ODR provider to plug in, in much the same way that UPI revolutionised payments by giving every bank and every app a shared rail to build on. India tends to solve problems at the infrastructure layer when it solves them properly, and ODR is a good example of what that looks like in practice.

The bridge

What makes Shreya interesting beyond her own story is that she has lived on both sides of the bridge between the Indian and international legal tech ecosystems, and she has clear views on what each side keeps getting wrong about the other.

For Indian startups looking to scale into the UK and US, she offers a network and an instinct for what magic circle firms actually buy, which is not always what an Indian founder might assume from a distance. Last year she worked with the UK Department of Business and Trade to bring a contingent of Indian legal tech startups to the UK to meet magic circle firms, Scottish firms, and the Legal Tech Talk crowd, and that kind of bridging is something the industry could probably use more of.

For international players trying to enter India, she sees the same mistakes repeated. Pricing set for the US market with no real adjustment for local realities. Customer support sitting in time zones that do not overlap with the Indian working day. A lack of appreciation for the fact that the biggest Indian law firms still operate across multiple languages alongside English, and that most LLMs do not handle Indian languages or scripts particularly well, which means translation is a first-order use case rather than an afterthought. She makes the point that the legal AI players doing well in India have generally understood that the same product positioning does not travel intact, because the problem itself is not quite the same as it is in the US, and the reframing has to happen locally rather than being assumed away.

If you want to tap into this network, it is at indianlegaltech.net.

On influential women in legal tech

Shreya recently won an ILTA Influential Women in Legal Tech award.

We discuss how her award sits against a backdrop that most people in the industry recognise but that not enough are actively doing something about, which is that around 3% of startup funding flows to female founders, and legal tech is no exception.

As Shreya puts it, some parts of the ecosystem have become a “boys’ club” where the funders and the people asking for funding are both part of the same cycle, and that cycle is genuinely hard to break from inside it.

Her recommendations are practical rather than abstract. She suggests that if your firm runs an incubation programme, ring-fence dedicated seats for female founders. If you sit on a legal tech fund, write a hypothesis that requires a female founder on every backed team. And if you are a woman who has made it into a decision-making role with some capital to deploy, invest in another female founder, because even one extra month of runway can sometimes be the difference between a company that survives and one that doesn’t.

She also made an observation that that a lot of the buyer-side decision makers in legal innovation, the heads of innovation and heads of knowledge across the larger firms, are women, and the supply side of the industry has not really caught up with that.

On the AI-native firm

We finished, as I tend to with these conversations, on whether law firms are actually changing or just dressing the old model up in new clothes.

Shreya uses the factory electrification analogy, which is my personal favourite as well. When factories first switched from steam to electric power, owners swapped the engines but kept the same layout, the same processes and the same workflows, which meant they got slightly faster operations but not much else. The real productivity gains came decades later, when factories were redesigned from the ground up around the new power source rather than just retrofitting it into the old design.

Most law firms are still firmly in the swap-the-engines phase, treating AI as a tool that makes existing tasks slightly more efficient rather than as a medium for rethinking what legal work is and where the value actually sits. Look at almost any legal tech company website and the framing is the same: draft 20% faster, research 30% faster, all of which assume the underlying tasks remain the tasks lawyers do. The harder question, which Shreya thinks almost no firm has properly sat down with, is where the value layer actually lives in a professional services business once AI is properly in the picture, and what you would build if you started from that question rather than from the current shape of the firm.

AI is now forcing the rethink that should arguably have happened years ago, and for those of us interested in true innovation in legal services, that is probably the most exciting part.

If you are building in legal tech and you have not yet thought seriously about India, or if you are in India and thinking about scaling out, Shreya is the person to know. I look forward to seeing what she builds next.

Links

* indianlegaltech.net

* Shreya on LinkedIn

* Stephenson Harwood

This is a public episode. If you would like to discus...