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What is life.file
life.file is a web app that helps people create, store and share a life.file of all the legal life stuff their loved ones will need one day when they’re not around. It’s a bit like “Dropbox for death” but so much more. life.file is a subscription web app that costs users R29 / month paid annually at R348 or R49 / month paid monthly.
Why life.file is important
People don't like to think about and plan for life's worst moments - like dying or getting really sick. 70% of South Africans don’t even have a will. Getting your affairs in order is confronting, costly, time consuming and overwhelming. But worse, dying without your legal “ducks in a row” causes immense stress for the people you leave behind. Having your legal life stuff organised is more than being on top of your admin for “just in case”. It’s an empowering way of living your best life. Reduce stress, avoid disaster and look after the people you love most when things go pear shaped.
About the life.file web app
life.file guides users through the creation of a life.file containing all the legal life things they should have sorted out. life.file’s colourful, intuitive interface suggests all of the more obvious legal things like wills and living wills - plus all of the things that users probably aren’t thinking of. Like “what happens to my pets when I’m six feet under?” or “what happens to the domestic worker I employ when I die?”.
life.file’s document builder allows users to create their own bespoke wills in minutes. Users are guided through all the important questions to consider, with friendly educational pop-up resources along the way that explain complicated legal jargon in normal-people-speak. Once a user creates their life.file, it’s stored in life.file’s encrypted digital vaults. Security is very important to life.file, which is why we adopt industry best practices to keep user documents safe. Users are encouraged to share their life.files with a few trusted people in their lives - like a family members or their spouses - for “one day when…”. life.file helps users make sure that the people in their lives who’ll be left behind one day have what they need to wrap up their estate. Without the unnecessary admin. And heartache. And guessing at passwords.
About the company
life.file is a female-founded African startup and legal technology company. The life.file co-founders, Sinal Govender and Claire Keet, are on a simple mission to improve the way that people experience the legal parts of life and death. The law is a guest at life’s best and worst moments - like starting a business, beginning or ending a marriage, or burying loved ones. These experiences are universal. Govender and Keet believe in using intuitive, people focused design and normal-people-speak to create a user experience of the law that is simple, educational and friendly. Their team works where law, design and technology meet and have picked the best bits of all three to create life.file.
The life.file story
One day, Claire got a call from her mom. A few people in her folks’ greater community had died, leaving their spouses behind to navigate wrapping up their estates. It was all very sad and stressful. Claire and her mom discussed the horrific reality of being left behind to simultaneously navigate grief and estate administration. The second Claire hung up, she went hunting online for something to solve this problem. When she came up empty handed, she decided to design the solution herself and started immediately.
Sinal studied succession law at university. It was one of her favourite subjects and highest marks and perhaps the start of her twisted love affair with mortality and death. After losing her mom in 2017 to a long battle with cancer, she came face to face with everything she’d studied. In reality - even with a career as a Big Law attorney behind her - trying to make space to grieve while and navigating her mom’s estate (strewn across boxes and files) was a nightmare.
Sinal spotted the early rumblings of life.file on Instagram and knew instantly that she wanted to work with the person on the other side of the account. Claire and Sinal met for brunch where they connected instantly over a shared problem: to make it easier for people to get their legal life ducks in a row so that they could avoid the heartache and stress of estate administration.
The co-founder story
In early 2020, entrepreneur Claire Keet woke up to a message from a stranger from the internet. It was former ‘Big Law’ attorney, Sinal Govender, taking a leap of faith. The duo brunched and hit it off immediately, realising that they were on a similar mission in their different ways to solve the same big problem. That problem being that people don’t plan for things like dying or getting really sick because legal death stuff is confronting, expensive and intimidating. Their unique combination of Sinal’s inside knowledge and Claire’s outside perspective combined perfectly for them to ‘do law differently’. When they met, Claire had just closed shop on her previous startup and was working on the beginnings of life.file. Sinal had left a six year career as a Senior Associate in corporate law and was running a low cost legal consultancy.
They dove straight in and started to solve the problem they’d each been trying to solve alone. Only this time, they were each other’s secret weapons. The duo started their first first venture together - pop.law - on the first day of South Africa’s national lockdown in 2020. pop.law landed free legal death resources in the hands of thousands of South Africans and was accelerated by the Hague Institute for Innovation of Law in 2020-21. Govender and Keet were both listed as the Mail & Guardian’s 200 young people for 2020 in the Justice & Law category. They launched life.file in June 2021.
About Claire Keet
Claire Keet’s varied career is woven together by the use of design as a powerful tool to solve problems for people - meaningfully and distinctively. Not one to fit into any shape, least of all a box, Claire’s entrepreneurial pursuit began as a fresh out of university 23 year old somewhere in South Korea. Since then, she has designed and run businesses across the Design, Wellness, Sex and Legal industries for the past decade. Lean Startup Methodology is the framework she adopts to bring business ideas to life, being a firm believer that it’s always better to go full steam on something that might fail than not trying at all or waiting for ‘everything to be perfect’. The only exception to this rule, of course, being her perfectly made bed. Claire believes in getting things done herself, regardless if anyone else believes she has the qualifications to do so. It comes as no surprise then, that she co-founded pop.law in 2020 and life.file in 2021, with the ambition to democratise access to legal help through the design of legal products, services and content that breaks down barriers - without having spent a single day studying the law. She has been recognised for her efforts as the only non-lawyer listed as one of the Mail & Guardian’s 200 young people for 2020 in the Justice & Law category.
About Sinal Govender
Growing frustrated by living her life one billable hour to the next, Sinal Govender left her job as a Senior Associate at one of the world's largest law firms in 2017 to start delivering legal services on her own terms. She is equally passionate about and committed to using technology as a tool to change the socio-economic landscape of South Africa. This journey lead to her starting her first fixed cost legal consultancy a few weeks after walking out of her glam Sandton office. She has since worked with a legal-tech company based out of London, an ed-tech maths NGO here in South Africa, and walked the start-up path with many other entrepreneurs as their legal advisor. She co-founded her latest tech ventures, pop.law and life.file, in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Sinal’s only goal in life is to be the most ethical person she knows (and she knows a lot of people). An integral part of this pursuit is to make sure that she always uses her talent, knowledge and resources to make things easier for the people she works with. She has always enjoyed learning from younger people, and has taken an active interest in developing young minds since she lead the team at the Lexden Leadership School whilst still at university. Sinal is currently a business coach to young entrepreneurs through the Allan Gray Orbis Foundation.
Co-founder quotes
“Despite the legal parts of life and death being a universal certainty, no one was helping any of us get prepared. Not in the affordable, user friendly way we want to be helped anyway. life.file is our solution to a problem we couldn’t find a good enough solution for” - Claire Keet
“Making legal resources available in ways that are friendly, accessible and affordable seem like obvious choices, but they’re rule breaking, opening up an industry that normally makes legal life stuff intimidating, overwhelming and costly” - Sinal Govender
Contact information
www.lifefile.co.za
hello@lifefile.co.za
www.instagram.com/mylifefile
please email hello@lifefile.co.za
