Davidson College grad and app developer returns as innovator in residence
Davidson College’s innovation hub has named its first innovator in residence: Mbye Njie, a 40-year-old Davidson alumnus and creator of the smartphone app Legal Equalizer.
Founded in 2018, The Hurt Hub@Davidson is a 23,000-square-foot facility for teaching, research and office space for businesses. The space hosts more than 135 members of the community, including entrepreneurs, innovators and small business owners, who engage with faculty and students while working there, says director Liz Brigham.
The hub’s “innovator in residence” role is funded by Davidson College president Carol Quillen’s office. Njie will receive a $75,000 grant to continue building his app, adding new features. Legal Equalizer will also hire at least two Davidson students using about $6,500 from the grant.
The role started in July and will last until next June.
App captures police encounters
Njie’s name is not unfamiliar to Davidson students and surrounding communities. Created in 2015, his app Legal Equalizer allows users to capture their interactions with the police when they are stopped by an officer.
It also includes descriptions of relevant laws so that users know their rights, and alerts selected contacts during the encounter.
The has 250,000 registered users and 350,000 downloads – a big increase from just six months ago, Njie said. In January, Legal Equalizer participated in the Cox Enterprises Social Impact Accelerator program through seed accelerator Techstars. The program provides mentorship and seed funding to start-ups that address social justice and systemic racism issues.
Cox Enterprise’s program allowed Njie’s team to fully focus on building the app for three months, instead of relying on funding from friends and families, he said. Now, Njie and the company’s chief technology officer work full-time in developing the app but outsourced the coding.
With the grant from the Hurt Hub, Njie plans to finish new features of the app. A future version of the app, for example, will include a live-streaming function that summons eyewitnesses to the call, so that someone will watch the encounter in real time. The alert function will be extended from only selected contacts to anyone in the neighborhood, in the event that the user’s loved ones can’t make it to the scene.
If a user gets a traffic ticket, they will soon be able to post a picture of the ticket to the app and be reminded of the court date – another feature Njie wants to add to the app through the grant. Research has shown that many are stopped simply because they missed a court date, he said, and Legal Equalizer wants to avoid situations like that.
The grant will also allow Njie to build a secondary app that connects attorneys with the users. During interactions with law enforcement, users will be able to call attorneys and make real-time consultations, rather than postponing the call until they are behind bars.
Legal Equalizer is in the process of establishing a partnership with a group of 65,000 attorneys, Njie said. “They’re very receptive to it because a lot of attorneys already take phone calls when people get pulled over.”
The app has also received endorsement from Cedric Alexander, a former police chief at Njie’s hometown in Georgia, The Observer previously reported. At a Hurt Hub event, Njie said that most police departments he approached were willing to partner up.
The app’s legal ordinance library and built-in camera feature are free to users. Getting in contact with an attorney might involve a fee.
Using liberal arts to solve problems
Njie graduated from Davidson College in 2004 with an anthropology degree but without prior experience in tech. Through sharing his own entrepreneur experience, he wants students to see the potential of a liberal arts education.
“What I want students to understand is you can use this education (to) solve real-world problems,” he said. “You don’t have to go into a nine-to-five job, you don’t have to go to corporate America, you can be a history major and you can build it out.”
Legal Equalizer has already hired seven Davidson students in the past through the hub’s Gig-Hub program, which connects companies with students for short-term employment. Njie said that he wants to offer students opportunities to see what an entrepreneur actually goes through and get hands-on experience by participating in roles such as marketing, sales, website development, coding and translation.
“I’m not going to give the students a designated role ... because when I was that age, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Njie said. As a result, he wants incoming student hires to gradually find out what they want to learn by trying out different roles.
As someone who graduated college and started to build a tech company from the ground up, Njie hopes that his experience will encourage students to keep trying.
“I want them to see that it can be done for someone like me, you know, a goofball in Davidson, to be frank, to grow up and be a real adult eventually, and actually do something without being afraid to fail,” he said.
Stops of students led to app
Without his time at Davidson, Njie said, he couldn’t have started the company.
Earlier this year, Njie talked to students at a Hurt Hub event about how his time in college inspired him to create the app. As part of the first large class of African-American public school students at the college, he told them, Njie and his friends often got pulled over by police officers. That was when he started to bring printed copies of North Carolina laws with him to show the police about his rights.
Such experiences were not rare in his hometown Georgia, and during his time working in sales in Charlotte before starting the app, he said during the event. But it was after he learned about the high-profile case in Ferguson, Mo., where Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer, that he recognized the urgency of recording the police interactions.
“I am excited for students to see us expanded, and to pick up their brains, because this was built for students mainly. For them to be able to work on something that was built to affect them directly is in line with what I’ve been thinking about for a while,” Njie said.
This story was originally published July 21, 2021 at 11:51 AM.