Last month, Manupatra, a pioneer of online legal research in India with a repository including an extensive citation database covering more than 320 Indian journals and 130 international journals forged an alliance with Legora, among the leading collaborative AI for legal professionals. In a free wheeling interview with Jyotsna Bhatnagar of FE, Deepak Kapoor, founder CEO of Manupatra explains how the partnership has potential to shape the legal landscape. Excerpts:
Your core revenue engine has been subscription-led, with modular plans and add-ons. As you layer Manupatra AI and a broader “legal tech suite” on top, what is the end-state business model?
Our core Manupatra research platform will remain subscription-led, as seat-based and pure usage models have not worked well in the Indian market. For our AI products, we follow a consumption-based approach, which helps us maintain sustainable unit economics.
We also believe that one size does not fit all, so our pricing is modular, allowing customers to choose what suits their needs. As we expand our legal tech suite, this is evolving into a hybrid model which combines annual subscriptions with solution-specific metrics such as the number of cases, contracts, or usage units, depending on the product.
Your recent alliance with Legora is being described as an exclusive partnership. Can you elaborate what this entails?
Our arrangement with Legora is limited to subscribers who hold valid subscriptions to both Manupatra and Legora, enabling them to access Manupatra either directly through Manupatra or via the Legora platform. When accessed through Legora, users may integrate documents into their workflows to fully utilise the platform’s features and capabilities.
Manupatra has neither licensed its content to Legora nor permitted its data to be hosted on Legora’s servers. All IPR in the content continue to vest exclusively with Manupatra. We will not promote or sell Legora in India. Legora will promote Manupatra in International markets.
How are you designing “authoritative answers” so users can see sources, audit reasoning, and avoid hallucinations, and what governance do you apply when AI outputs touch high-stakes decisions for firms and in-house teams?
Our AI system has been designed on Manupatra’s authoritative database. Searches are conducted on the Manupatra database comprising millions of documents. At no stage is the AI search happening on any LLM. Further, all answers and references are hyperlinked to source documents, thus ensuring authenticity. We only show our citation and the engine is not allowed to create citations.
We have built in guardrails too to eliminate hallucination. The system is also trained not to give answers in certain scenarios, so in some cases no response may be provided, thus ensuring no hallucination.
On data governance we follow a silos (partition) based system wherein one user data is not visible to the other and user data is not used for training. Data at rest and from client to our servers and back is encrypted and at the end of the day all search quarries are automatically deleted.
You are moving beyond research into workflow tools (case, contract, compliance, IPR, etc.). What is the product logic behind this?
Our objective is to diversify our product portfolio and create new streams of ARR. We aim to meet the full range of professional requirements of our target audience and their evolving needs, including legal research, case tracking, summarisation, translation, OCR, drafting, compliance, contracts etc through a single, integrated platform.
To support this, we are creating a seamless workflow that connects all our products on one platform. This helps us cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers, increase engagement, improve retention, and position Manupatra as a complete operating system for legal teams.
On the “tech-legal marketplace” idea, what are the guardrails to prevent it becoming a noisy directory rather than a trust-based procurement channel for users?
Manupatra was never envisaged to be a market place. We will never host third party tools on our website . All our tools would be connected to our authoritative database. Lawyers , law firms, in house teams, law schools, central and state governments and judiciary are our target audience.