What engagements is Wokanda.net aimed at? Anatomy of a “small matter”

The question of what engagements land on the platform comes back in conversations with law firms almost every time – and usually with the tacit assumption that it is about winning clients. Well, no. Our area is specific, closed engagements of modest unit value. Such engagements are the vast majority of the market, and it is they – not spectacular transactions – that fill the calendar of an average firm.

What I mean by a “closed engagement”

A closed engagement is an action that can be described in a few sentences, priced up front and settled immediately after performance. In practice these are most often:

• attending a session or hearing as a substitute;
• inspecting court or prosecution files, with photocopies;
• collecting a document, filing a pleading, attending an inspection;
• preparing an interlocutory appeal or another pleading of limited scope;
• attending an action at the prosecutor's office or the police.

The common denominator is one: the beginning and the end are known at the moment of engagement. There is no room here for the “and while you are at it, please take a look at this contract”, which in open engagements consumes half of counsel's time.

What you will not find on Wokanda

A line must honestly be drawn. Large, complex engagements spread over time are not our area of interest. In other words: if a corporate client is looking for a lawyer for a factory-acquisition transaction or to run a major commercial case – probably not on Wokanda.

But when the firm running that big case needs a lawyer for a specific action within it – inspecting the file in a court 400 km away, being present at one hearing, filing a pleading on time – then Wokanda.net is the right place. A big case is, after all, made up of dozens of small actions, and it is precisely those actions that can sensibly be delegated.

Why this segment

The reasons are as follows.

It is the largest and worst-served part of the market

The legal services market is usually described through the lens of big cases, yet statistically small actions dominate. No infrastructure has ever been built for them – no market, no standard, no settlement. A post in a group is not infrastructure.

This is where the economics works hardest

For an action priced at 300–600 zł, the cost of your own travel, a hotel night and a lost working day is incomparably higher than a local provider's fee. The arithmetic is so obvious that it is surprising the market functioned without a tool for so long.

These are engagements that can be standardised

A closed action lets you define the scope, price, date and reporting method up front. And if so, the whole flow – from publishing the engagement to releasing the fee – can run along one predictable path. An open case conducted for years cannot be closed like that, and no reasonable person should try.

Who benefits – two sides of the same engagement

For the ordering firm it is a way to handle matters across the country without building branch offices and without carving a day out of the calendar. For the provider – especially younger colleagues and sole practitioners – it is a source of predictable, short engagements in a city where they are in court several times a week anyway. The marginal cost of an extra action in the same building is close to zero, and the revenue is real.

Summary

Wokanda.net does not compete for big cases and does not intend to. We deal with the fragment of the market that every practitioner knows, nobody likes to organise, and which decides whether a working day is spent on the merits or on the A2 motorway. In my view, that is where the largest reserve of efficiency in Polish law firms lies.

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