By Inna Ptitsyna.
I am Inna Ptitsyna, Head of Communications at Lawrina. Also, I am an ambassador of the Kyiv Legal Hackers international community, interested in legal design.
Lawrina is a legal platform aimed to improve free access to legal information in the U.S. and build an innovative community around lawyers. We are building an ecosystem with legal information more accessible for legal practitioners and easier to comprehend to the general public, new opportunities for lawyers' collaboration and growth.
Most of our team are Ukrainians, as it has been proven that they are one of the best professionals in the field of innovation. Our Ukrainian team is safe. Some of them are forced to the bomb shelters, others are joining Ukrainian Military Forces to defend their country. However, we do our absolute best as an organization to continue service as we all want to help our country fight with the enemy by all means.
Did you or other parts of the team move to a new location, either in Ukraine or out of the country?
The situation is different for each member. Someone has left the country, someone has moved to the Ukrainian western cities, and someone is remaining in their cities or has gone to their relatives. I am staying near Kyiv with my family because it’s safe here (as much as it is possible). And I do believe that just being with my family gives me strength.
Is everyone working remotely? Prior to Russia's attacks, was most of the company working remotely?
Now we all are working remotely. It’s more convenient for us because, before the Russian full-scale invasion, we all worked hybrid: 3 days in the office and 2 days from home. But there was a possibility to go to the office all 5 days. However, there is a lot of psychological pressure we try to do our best. We care about our clients and we understand how important it is to keep going implementing our mission right now.
During this crisis, what has your daily work routine entailed? Has your personal daily life changed?
All my world changed. And I do believe that it’s also true for all people from our team, our country, the international community as a whole. First 4 days I, like many others, only tried to digest this situation, to understand all the changes. I do a lot of volunteer work in communications because I wanted to help my country from the first day. Then I begin to understand how to readjust life to the new reality and which of the work tasks I should do. On the 6th day, I started to dive into a work routine. But I am still trying to get to a normal schedule and amount of tasks. We all understand “why” do we need to keep going, so there is no doubt that we could find an answer for “how”.
How has the crisis impacted operations?
We all and the international community believed that it’s impossible for war to happen. The 24th of February was a shock for all the world. It should be a normal workday, but a full-scale Russian invasion crashed our plans. Everything stopped for a day, then we were trying to continue to work for customers and only a few days ago we started to restore everything at full capacity. Of course, because we all are working remotely and there could be problems with connections, therefore, we have almost no meetings. But we try to keep in touch, support each other and not just with work tasks. Moreover, we involve more colleagues from abroad to keep our operations more stable.
We do believe that Ukraine will win and we will achieve even more. Most of our top management stayed in Ukraine and they not only believe in our country, but they also try to support it.
Is the company concerned about cybersecurity threats or business disruptions?
Because we work in the legal tech sector where security and stability are very important we care about our security a lot. Therefore, from the beginning, we have taken serious security measures and hired the best specialists. However, our security measures have been set up very well before, now we take even greater care of them. Moreover, all data is stored on servers out off Ukraine, so we are calm about the data of the company and our customers
Is it more difficult to focus on software development and/or the business as the country is under attack?
While neighbor country attacked your country, you could not think of anything else. The primary needs now are physiological safety and normalization of the psychological state. But the strength of the Ukrainian people and the support of our own international partners helped us to focus on things we are professionals at.
So once our team members were able to meet those needs, it became possible to focus on development and business. Also, our company understood the situation and assured everyone that the most significant thing is to be safe and take care of the safety of their loved ones.
Are any members of your startup participating in the Ukraine military? If so, what are they doing? Are they balancing legal tech work and their country obligations?
All of us understand that it’s important to help our country fight with the enemy by all means. Also, since most of our startup members have creative and tech expertise, they joined the “informational army” to help share the truth and protect cyberspace. They are trying to balance volunteer work with their daily tasks.
We believe that with an experience like this we will become even stronger and will fearlessly develop our project and implement our mission.