qLegal was delighted to form a new partnership with Enterprise Nation recently, recognising the shared aims of both organisations to support enterprise.
qLegal students Nina and Mateo interviewed Polly Dhaliwal, who oversees the Enterprise Nation platform, to gain insight into Enterprise Nation and the company’s involvement with qLegal.
Enterprise Nation supports a diverse range of start-ups and small businesses across the UK. Clients include food and drink, health and wellness, and creative brands. Enterprise Nation works by matching small businesses to advisors. They run numerous campaigns and have partnerships with some of the biggest tech companies like Facebook (‘She means business’, which delivers support to female entrepreneurs in the UK), Uber (helping business owners access funding though Uber via Enterprise Nation), SalesForce and Amazon.
Enterprise Nation can be broken down into three elements:
With the goal of improving their clients’ access to legal advice, Enterprise Nation started researching how to reach out to more legal service providers and how market-place technologies across the world are connecting small-businesses to lawyers.
The collaboration with qLegal began with an interdisciplinary hackathon, in which students were trained in the Legal Design process to come up with innovative solutions to help Enterprise Nation achieve its goal. qLegal was keen to have its law students working alongside Queen Mary’s computer science students, reflecting that lawyers have to be able to collaborate across disciplines in practice. Consequently, mixed teams competed to deliver a prototype to best match small businesses with the support they need.
The four teams of students examined the search engine part of the platform and came up with numerous ideas on how Enterprise Nation can better support businesses looking for legal support. The hackathon weekend was the culmination of 4 weeks’ intense work by the students who were researching the market and developing prototypes. The ideas included developing an app; a chatbot that helped entrepreneurs recognise what type of legal support they might need; improved search functionality; and helping lawyers improve the way they communicate their expertise to non-lawyers.
The teams made their pitches to a panel of external judges who gave very positive feedback, as did Emma Jones, Enterprise Nation’s Founder and CEO who commented ‘Wow… It's incredible to see this level of innovation and well thought through solutions.’
A major reason why Enterprise Nation decided to get involved with qLegal is because they believe the next generation of young entrepreneurs have already started their journey now, and the best way to support them in their journey is through knowledge and business insights. In addition to the hackathon, Enterprise Nation are also hosting four qLegal students as externs, giving them the opportunity to build their commercial awareness and business skills and have great experience on their CVs. “It’s a win-win situation”, says Polly Dhaliwal from Enterprise Nation.
This news item was produced by qLegal students Nina Prusac and Mateo Garcia Fuentes