For a workaholic like Zahra Marani there is nothing worse than boredom.

But the endless days the Canadian spent in Leicester waiting for permission to work in the UK ultimately led to the birth of a new company.

During her days in the doldrums, lawyer Zahra set up a website called SolicitorsSearch.com, which she believes exploits a gap in the advertising market.

The site is a directory of UK legal services which aims to help people and businesses find the right lawyer first time, instead of wasting time contacting lawyers with the wrong expertise.

Zahra, 31, said: "The legal profession is behind the rest in terms of advertising and people often call up a solicitor and waste everyone's time because they don't know what the company does.

"Maybe they're after a family lawyer and the company they're talking to only does litigation.

"My site lets the solicitors show a lot of information about themselves. People can search for the right kind of lawyer in the right area."

The website has around 40 companies paying between £440 and £800 annually to advertise.

Zahra said she hoped the first year of trading would generate a turnover of around £50,000 – but it could be much more.

Zahra is also working full time as a solicitor at Douglas Wemyss in Friar Lane, Leicester. She also takes weekly seminars for undergraduates studying law at the University of Leicester.

Zahra, who spends up to 18 hours a day on her internet site and her day job, gets her zeal for hard work from her parents.

They were entrepreneurial Ugandan Asians who fled to Canada when they were expelled by Idi Amin in 1972.

Zahra first came to England in 2004 to study at the University of Leicester.

As well as getting a law degree and a masters in international commercial law, she met her future husband, medical student Navjot Nannar, from Birmingham.

After graduating in 2007, she returned to Canada to study for her bar exam. She and Navjot married in August last year and the following month they moved to Leicester together.

Zahra said: "When I first came here I couldn't work and it took until February this year for my papers to come through.

"My husband was always working or on call, and having nothing to do was pretty tough for me. I decided that instead of sitting at home I could set up a business."

The start-up costs were £20,000 and Zahra's parents and Navjot all bought stakes in the new venture.

The website, at www.solicitorssearch.com, finally went live on June 12.

Zahra said she received some last-minute encouragement.

She said: "The month before we launched I read an article about a Law Society study that was all about how more and more people were searching for solicitors online but how few companies were actually benefiting."

A core idea behind SolicitorsSearch is that clients can update their own pages. They can have up to six images and treat their page as a news blog.

They also write articles for the site.

Zahra also writes for the site and said keeping it up to date was hard work.

"There's this massive misconception that a website-based business is easy," Zahra said.

Zahra's website has seen the number of hits it receives rise to more than 100 per day.

The site has two Twitter accounts, a Facebook page and a Linkedin account which have 900 followers between them.

And Zahra's job now is to keep innovating and keep expanding into new areas to grow the business.

She said: "There are more websites than humans on the planet and a website doesn't get passing traffic.

"You have to grab people's attention. The hard part of creating the site is done and people are now finding us."