Yoni Balkind

Founded and deployed a thought leadership site for the legal industry and grew it organically into one of Africa's leading online legal information portals. Golegal was a profitable, largely automated business and was eventually sold in 2018.

Lexafari is a first-of-its-kind global legal information platform helping business owners and legal counsel obtain legal information and find relevant legal services for their needs.

As a research platform, Lexafari provides legal guides and checklists for startups, business owners, and in-house counsel. Our global guides are designed to help readers with company formation and maintenance, global hiring, and IP protection, among others.

While our legal guides may attract our readers, our purpose is to help them find services that match their research topics.

I managed a project centered around an eCommerce store selling TV hardware and optional installation services. It required an unusual sales and checkout flow to facilitate combined product and service sales and after-sales tracking.

Legal Heavies was an MVP/prototype directory for lawyers. Its purpose was to showcase individual lawyers and their specific areas of experience and expertise. The premise is that people who need legal help will be dealing closely with a specific professional. Most directories list law firms, but potential clients are more likely to send an inquiry when there is a specific individual lawyer whom they can contact. Legal Heavies has been placed on hold. Although it is incomplete, the prototype is still live and can be viewed. It contains a lead form to contact individual lawyers. The subsequent feature set that has not yet been developed is to have built-in scheduling, online consultation, and payment services to facilitate client-lawyer interaction and onboarding smoothly.

The site is custom-built in WordPress, utilizing custom post types and fields.

I partnered with a local financial services fund interested in launching an alternative student finance operation. They required an investigation into the potential business model, revenue projections, competitor analysis, operating plan, and go-to-market plan. Over several months, I reviewed the leading global industry players and met with several thought leaders and experts in the alternative student finance field.

The completed 40-slide deck can be seen here https://tinyurl.com/yckkzwas

I also produced a thought leadership article after that, proposing a public-private co-operative model to address student financing - https://hackernoon.com/can-government-income-share-agreements-fix-higher-education-ih383yrp