A lot of the emerging legal marketplaces out there aim to connect lawyers with business or individual clients. Hire an Esquire specializes in connecting lawyers with law firms and in-house departments, thereby cutting out recruiters and making on-demand lawyers a viable and efficient option. By the way--Hire an Esquire is co-founded by two women. Following the ABA Journal article, I realized that the blog hasn't covered many female-led law startups, so here's our first!
1) Tell
me about yourselves.
Julia
Shapiro and Jules Miller have been friends since they were 14, when they met in
high school in Pittsburgh, PA. Julia became an attorney and adjunct legal
professor, and Jules, a non-attorney, worked at a Big 4 accounting firm and
spent several years in Silicon Valley. Both have been entrepreneurial and
'intrapreneurial' throughout their careers, and finally joined forces to build
Hire an Esquire. After initially introducing the company in 2011, they have
started working on the company full time since January 2013.
2) What
inspired you to create Hire an Esquire?
Julia worked as a
contract attorney for a few years and really enjoyed it. Her co-workers were
very interesting people who worked hard, but actually had time outside of the
office to do other things. She saw the benefits of having a flexible legal
workforce, but the brick and mortar legal staffing firms have traditionally
been inefficient.
Hire an Esquire believes
in the future of a flexible workforce. It is happening in every other
industry, facilitated by technology platforms, but the legal industry has been
a bit slower to adopt this model. This presents an opportunity to
make law firms more efficient and attorneys more entrepreneurial, and to
change the legal industry for the better.
2) Tell
me about Hire an Esquire (what does it do?)
Hire an
Esquire is a technology platform that helps law firms and in-house legal
departments find, manage, pay and maintain relationships with a flexible
workforce of attorneys and paralegals.
3) How is
it different from the other legal marketplace websites?
Hire an Esquire is the
only legal marketplace that offers firms an option to work with contract-based
attorneys on a W-2 basis, where Hire an Esquire is the employer of record and
covers all the related HR and insurance details. This allows us to work
with the large law firms, who need W-2 staffing due to IRS employee
classification requirements. This also allows us to work with attorneys
who are not set up as solo practitioners with malpractice insurance.
While we can still certainly match solos to clients on a 1099 basis, the
W-2 functionality is what truly makes us unique.
How are you different from Axiom Law?
We have a
similar model but first and foremost Hire an Esquire is a technology company. Also,
Axiom caters primarily to in-house legal departments while we work primarily with
law firms. All clients can access our community of attorneys simply by logging
in and posting jobs. We open the gates and give our clients tools to find the
right people quickly and easily without a recruiter.
5) What's
innovative about it?
We
streamline and automate a traditional process—legal staffing—to make it better,
faster and cheaper. We are the first technology company to redefine legal
staffing online. Our platform is very user-friendly, and was developed
from scratch. Our new CTO is creating algorithms to find the best attorneys for
the job, thereby cutting out traditional recruiters.
6) What's
been your greatest challenge thus far?
Law firms
can be their own worst enemy. At this point, most firms we speak to
understand that this is the future of the industry, but the way firms are
structured makes it very difficult for them to adopt new technologies and
practices.
8) What's
been your greatest success so far?
Surviving
until the legal industry was ready for our product! We saw the need for
Hire an Esquire in 2009 and launched the initial product in 2011, but law firms
were not ready for it then. There were some lean years at the beginning,
but the tide has definitely shifted and our growth in the past 6 months has
been phenomenal. We were a bit too early, but luckily we had enough conviction
to stick with it.
7) What
is the demographic of your main customer?
We work
primarily with AM Law 200 firms and Fortune 500 legal departments.
However, the beauty of a technology platform like Hire an Esquire is that
it's accessible to firms and businesses of all sizes. Once they are
verified, firms can simply log in to post jobs and get matched with the best
attorney and paralegal candidates around the country.
Where are you in terms of funding?
We closed a
seed round in December 2013 for $350,000. We look forward to raising a $2-3M
Series A at the end of this year.
9) What
changes do you foresee in the company? the legal industry?
For Hire an
Esquire, we look forward to expanding geographically to fully penetrate the top
5 cities that are legal hotspots, since to date we have only been in the
Philadelphia and New York markets. We're also launching several
innovative programs that go above and beyond what is traditionally considered
to be legal staffing, so stay tuned! As the industry changes, we plan to
change with it.
For the
legal industry, there will be an evolution both in terms of how the law is
practiced and how law firms are operated, driven by the adoption of new
technologies.
Any advice for aspiring legal
entrepreneurs?
It’s a lot
harder than you think so be prepared! Lawyers are one of the most challenging
markets to sell to. You can’t just do SEO and expect people to come—there’s a
lot of traditional sales and brand building. Don’t expect any shortcuts, just
stick with it and focus on building strong relationships.
