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. In other words, not only is our app useful to translate phrases from language to another, it also allows English speakers who are not familiar with legal jargon, easily comprehend them.
The most heavily penetrated part of the market would be non-native English speakers would are currently residing in a English speaking country. 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:
Taiwanese student at Stanford whose mother was a nurse when she resided in the U.S. She helped translate many complicated medical documents to older patients who spoke primarily Taiwanese or Mandarin Chinese. From the stories of his mother, he believes that doing this is second nature for trained medical professionals. However, he did say that “[Our product] could serve more like WebMD by being a quick way to provide trustworthy information, but would forego the specialized advice that a nurse can give.” He brought up an anecdote about how past researchers used this technology to parse through complicated legal documents, and compared the times and accuracy against a lawyer who was tasked to do the same. Results indicated that the lawyer had a nearly 100% success rate, but took much longer than the AI that had an 80% success rate but only took 20 minutes. With this in mind, he also said he’d only use the product if it were free. Because of this, I think a lot of the market could be geared toward lower-income or immigrant families who may not be able to afford a good lawyer to parse through their documents.
Interview 2:
Canadian student whose father is a doctor and whose mother is a nurse in Toronto. Her mother is Portuguese, and spent a lot of time translating complicated medical documents for her father. She expressed the sentiment that these documents can be extremely frustrating when you don’t know the language, and this is especially the case in America if an immigrant family does not have a child who grew up fluent in English. My interviewee expressed that this scenario, however, also puts a lot of burden on the children of immigrant families. “Even for English native speakers, documents are confusing!” she mentioned in response to this. She also mentions an anecdote of visiting her father at his work, and patients expressing frustration when doing things such as filling out forms that required “extra steps” like putting in their health information, or needing to bring their fluent child with them in consultations. Similarly to the first interview, I feel that a lot of market can be geared towards lower-income or immigrant families, especially those who may be more sensitive such as older people or families without fluent children.
