Product Description: An app that translates legal English into simplified common phrases, which can then be translated into other languages.
Market Overview: Because our product is offered in two layers: 1). simplifying legal Jargon; 2).translating simplified English legal phrases, we have a large market opportunity.
The most heavily penetrated part of the market would be non-native English speakers would are currently residing in a English speaking country. For instance, as one of my interviewee states “most immigrants face a lot of legal paperwork. From banks, houses, cars to the DMV, IRS, and/or homeland security.”To calculate this portion’s TAM we add up all immigrants in US, Canada, and UK (3 major English speaking country that accepts the most immigrants). TAM_1 = 45 + 7.5 + 6 = 58.5 million people. (data from 2019)
Realistically speaking, majority of native English speakers do not understand most legal jargon. However, to make a conservative assumption, we will only assume that the TAM here includes the general population who has only reached a high school diploma. According to the BLS, in 2019 ~3 mil US students attended a post-secondary school for the first time, with 30.5 mil of students in that age range (18-24). If we use this number as a ratio against population count, we can generate the total amount of students (18-24) who did not attend college in US, Canada, and UK. TAM_2 = 27.5 + 3.1 + 5.5 = 36.1(data from 2019)
TAM_total = 58.5 + 36.1 = 94.6 mil people
Based on our model, we would only be able to capture mostly US immigrant users first with small amounts of native English users, so SAM of 35 mil people. Given the language barrier, we would have to first market our products to firms to directly engage with immigrant customers so probably only capture SOM of 20 mil.
Interview 1:
A student at Stanford University with two highly educated parents and a medical history that requires significant amounts of reading was interviewed. Both him and his parents are fluent in English and he reads of all of his paperwork and will read through everything alongside his parents to redact different parts of contracts. He mentions an incident during a Stanford event where liability waivers were used and how he felt pressured to sign it without reading the paperwork due to the length of the contract and social pressures. In addition, he mentions that many legal documents can be void if the information is place within the paper too discreetly. From this interview, we can infer that there is a need to shorten or reduce the content size of medical documents.
Interview 2:
A graduate student who is the daughter of a Vietnamese immigrant. She is fluent in English and Vietnamese and is responsible for the vast majority of her parents legal documentation since she was 10. She mentions that most of the time she does not read the terms and conditions fully since they tend to be long. She states that the most stressful and overwhelming part of the process is how much content and paperwork overall she has to work with due to her parents not understand the language fully. However, even if it were translated, one of her parents would still have a hard time since he did not complete formal higher education in Vietnam. From her interview, we identify a need to both translate documentation and simplify jargon.
