Valery Meshkov is an IT entrepreneur and the founder of Pravoved.ru and Jinn.
Valery Meshkov is a technology entrepreneur, founder of Pravoved.ru (https://pravoved.ru), a legaltech platform / marketplace of online lawyers where users can quickly get legal advice, and the service scales legal help through technology) and founder of Jinn ((https://jinn.ru), an a cloud-based corporate platform for employee assessment and development.
Valery’s journey is an example of a deliberate shift away from traditional legal practice toward a technology platform: not a “new kind of law firm,” but a transparent, scalable business that grows through data, processes, and product.
From Traditional Practice to a Platform
In the early years of his career, Valery worked as a classic practicing lawyer, supporting small businesses. It quickly became clear that the offline model is difficult to scale: revenue growth is constrained by the need to hire more people and expand the office. It’s linear growth — more people, more costs, and more manual management.
In 2011, Valery realized that the market lacked convenient, mass online formats for legal help comparable to LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer. Most people were forced to search for answers on forums filled with unverified comments, often written by people without formal legal education. Together with a partner, he invested his own funds and launched Pravoved.ru with the goal of making legal consultations доступible online for a broad audience.
Pravoved.ru’s Early Model: A Short User Journey and Marketplace Effects
The user journey was designed to be as simple as possible: a person came to the platform, described their situation in free form, and submitted the request into the system.
Then the core marketplace mechanism kicked in: multiple lawyers responded to the same question. The user could compare approaches, reasoning, and professional experience — getting a more reliable view than in a “one lawyer, one opinion” scenario. This format reduces the risk of a wrong decision and increases trust: when you see several independent professional perspectives, your choice becomes more informed.
Scaling Through Metrics: Consultations and a Steady Flow of Requests
During the scaling phase, the team focused on two key metrics: the number of consultations and a stable flow of requests from both individuals and businesses. Over time, the platform reached 4–7 million visitors per month and 1.5–2.5 thousand consultations per day — figures that show legal support can be packaged into a repeatable product and scaled through technology rather than endless headcount growth.
The Shift to B2B: How the Core Revenue Share Emerged
A pivotal moment came in 2014, when the team made a strategic bet on the B2B segment. Today, around 65% of revenue comes from lead generation for law firms and independent legal practitioners, while online consultations and advertising represent a smaller share.
This is a logical step for a platform: in B2B, demand is more predictable and unit economics are clearer, and for lawyers and firms the platform becomes a stable channel for inbound requests.
The Next Stage: Jinn as an HR Ecosystem
Jinn is an HR ecosystem for employee assessment, development, and performance management that brings fragmented HR processes into a single platform: surveys and employee listening, 360 / Performance Review, OKR/KPI goals, development plans, organizational structure, feedback, and analytics.
The logic is similar to what was done in LegalTech: turning a complex, often “manual” domain into a manageable product with transparent processes, data, and measurable outcomes.
Plans and Career Ambitions: Focusing on Scaling Jinn
My goal is to focus on building Jinn and scaling it, because I see enormous potential in the employee assessment and development space.
Today, company effectiveness depends less and less on intuitive management decisions and more and more on how well businesses can manage and analyze employee data: skills, performance, development dynamics, role fit, learning, and engagement.
To make work truly effective, companies are forced to move toward systematic, data-driven people management — just as they manage finance, product, or sales. This is exactly the direction in which I want to deepen my expertise: data-driven HR, competency assessment and development tools, analytics for team effectiveness and managerial decision-making, and technology products that help businesses improve performance while helping employees see clearer growth paths.
If in LegalTech we built a platform around trust and data, then in HRTech the task is similar: to make assessment and development processes transparent, scalable, and measurable.
