Ques:  What made you start Lawctopus?

Ans: We started Lawctopus as a 'website for law students' due to many reasons, random events and circumstances.When I was in 1st year law school, if anyone came across a great opportunity (essay competition with a big prize money or some cool conference) he/she did his/her best to hide it from everyone.I thought this was a very unhealthy practice and that such information needs to be 'somewhere'. That 'somewhere' did not exist then!There was this Orkut Community called 'Legal Internships in India' run by one Prateek Garg of GNLU. I found the community to be helpful with information like "What was the stipend in so and so internship", "What were the main tasks in so and so" etc.The idea of having internship experiences where all of such information is collated in one space came to my mind from this community.I've always been interested in writing and luckily got a freelance writing opportunity with Legally India. Kian Ganz (the founder) is wonderful person and helped me become a decent 'feature writer'. Kian used to reject some of my ideas for stories/features saying that they were too 'studenty' :)Then I happened to participate and luckily won a blogging competition organized by LegallyIndia. My Blogavatar LegalPoet won 35k cash award and my freelance gigs had give me another 15k rupees.I contract Chicken Poxin my 3rd year which meant at least 2 weeks of bed rest and nothing to do. I knew that something called lawstudent.in created by the guys at LST existed sometime back but it was no longer functional. It's in this period that this idea for a 'website for law students' concretized. I wrote everything I could think of in the blank pages of a book. The jottings were on what 'sections' the website would have, how much 'money' would be involved, the 'people' that will be there etc.Back in college, I pitched this idea to some friends. Many didn't sound enthused, some did. Those who did, asked me for a detailed, written proposal, which they had next day as a 17-18 word MS doc file.Dhruv Mairal, Prateek Bhandari, Debanshu Khettry and Naman Gupta then became the co-founders of Lawctopus! They are no longer active members of Lawctopus but continue to be good friends and well wishers.

Ques: Why the name Lawctopus?

Ans: So, we did book the name www.lawstudentindia.com. Most of the 'literature' on domain names suggested that you should book a 'descriptive' name. And nothing could be more descriptive than law student India. However, we soon realized that the name was boring and decided to think of cooler name. We were all sitting in Dhruv's room and brainstorming 'names'. We were sort of saying the 'good law firm' names of India aloud and thought that Trilegal was a nice name. (Stress on the word 'tri'). The discussion then went on to an internship with Trilegal etc.Someone said that one could even intern at Pentagon (stress on the word 'penta') and that Pentagon too is good name.And so it went: Tri-Penta-Hexa-Octa-Octo-Octopus-Lawctopus. Do note that it was the Foodball world cup time then and a certain Octopus was entertaining everyone.When someone said 'Lawctopus', Dhruv and me had the 'aha!' moment and we convinced everyone that that's the name we've been looking for.

Ques:  What the long terms goals of Lawctopus?

Ans: Our first tag-line was 'helping hands for law students' and encapsulates our long term goal. We want to publish regular content that's helpful for the careers of law students. We've been doing it well over the years and I hope we can continue serving our readers well.

Ques:  What is the revenue basis for Lawctopus?

Ans: We earn around Rs. 1.6L/month in profits. Most of the revenue comes through advertisements. We also earn some money by earning a percentage cut from referring courses. A tiny bit comes through the blogging course that we run.

Ques:  Where do you see yourself five years down the line?

Ans: Money doesn't excite me much though I realize that having a bit of it is important. So I don't see myself as a businessman. I see myself as a creative entrepreneur. Writing/publishing, building communities, education etc. excite me. So I think 5 years down the line I'll be continuing creating and building things in these fields.