PlainLegal: Combining an Online Marketplace with Workflow Tools

Apologies for a little gap in writing. It's taken a little while to settle in after my move to LA, but I promise we have some interesting articles in the pipeline! Today's article features former Biglaw attorney, now legal entrepreneur Nehal Madhani of PlainLegal, based out of NYC.

Tell me about PlainLegal.

PlainLegal is a marketplace that makes it easy for businesses to work with trusted lawyers. We show businesses relevant lawyers that can solve their legal problems and provide workflow tools for both sides that increase efficiency and transparency. Each lawyer on PlainLegal is screened to ensure a certain level of quality. We look for lawyers who understand the legal needs of their clients, communicate in plain English, and can efficiently deliver high-quality services at affordable rates. Our platform is unique because we combine a curated marketplace of lawyers with tools that make it easier for clients and lawyers to work together. 

What does the process look like for the customer?

PlainLegal streamlines the legal process. First, a customer describes their legal issue in plain English. From there, we show relevant lawyers that can help with that problem (we have a thorough screening process that each lawyer must go through before being accepted). Next, we provide a simple form that helps the entrepreneur explain their legal need to the lawyer. Once the lawyer and entrepreneur have agreed to work together, we provide access to simple workflow tools that increase the efficiency and transparency of the legal process for the customer. Through our research, we identified several pain points throughout the life of the legal project, so we built our workflow tools to eliminate those points of friction.

What was the most interesting thing you learned from all your market research?

Customers seem to face similar problems that cause them to avoid dealing with their legal problems. The first is identifying the legal problem. The second is finding a good, affordable lawyer. The third is actually working with that lawyer. We address each one of those problems with our marketplace and platform.

What makes a good lawyer?

For us, good lawyers are those who have relevant experience, communicate with customers in plain English, and provide clear, actionable steps to address legal issues.

How do you increase the efficiency of the legal process?

We have tools that streamline key aspects of the lawyer-client relationship such as communication and document management tools. For lawyers, we also enable them to create and upload engagement letters as well as collect payments.

What’s been your greatest challenge so far?

It’s the same as most other online marketplaces -- growing both sides at the right pace and avoiding a chicken-and-egg problem. We’ve addressed the chicken-and-egg problem with productivity tools that lawyers can use with their existing clients as well. 

What’s been your greatest success so far?

We’re still early in our process, but I’m happy to have helped our initial customers connect with a lawyer that solved their legal problems. Some of our customers had a tight deadline, and we were able to immediately connect them with the right lawyer.

How were you able to find your initial customer base?

Our first customers came from direct outreach, word of mouth, and referrals from other customers. 

How have you been able to handle the tech part the startup?

I learned how to program and developed our prototype. Recently, I’ve brought on a full-time developer to take over the tech side so that I can spend more time building the business.

Any advice to the aspiring legal entrepreneur?

Be patient and willing to understand/adapt to your constituents within the industry. Too many entrepreneurs (not just in the legal space) are intent on "disrupting" an industry. We should be building something that helps all parties.

What is your vision for either your startup, or the legal industry as a whole?

I have a few goals—I want legal services to be easy and affordable. I’d also like to see businesses start taking a preventative approach instead of a reactive approach to their business. As part of that, I’d like to see legal advice being regarded as a strategic and valuable element of a business. 

There are many great entrepreneurs working on problems in the space. I’m excited to see where the legal industry will go in the next 5-10 years, and I believe that we can make a meaningful impact on the accessibility of legal services. 

Lawdingo: The Non-Lawyer, Non-Engineer Changing the Legal Landscape

I was able to meet up with Nikhil Nirmel recently during a trip to NYC. We had previously met at the CodeX Conference, and he was one of the nicest people I'd met, so I figured I'd ask him for an interview on top of coffee. Lawdingo is a Y-Combinator backed startup that's recently moved from San Francisco to NYC. 

Before we get into the interview though, check out his hilarious commercial.  Cracks me up every time.

Tell me about yourself.

I started a company, Lawdingo, with the belief that I could get the legal industry online starting with initial legal consultations. I was the research lead at Yelp and an early employee of Yodle. I studied Operations and Information Management at Penn's Wharton School, and went through Y Combinator earlier this year. I'm 27 and as of recently I live in New York City. For some reason, I'm obsessed with building communications products.

What does Lawdingo do?

Lawdingo lets people find, talk to and work with lawyers online. We're creating a national network of attorneys who operate the virtual part of their practice through Lawdingo. This people gives people who just need to talk to a lawyer a huge amount of convenience. In just a few clicks and minutes they can be on the phone with an appropriate attorney, and in a few more clicks they can have entered into an attorney-client relationship with that lawyer, all online and all in one place.

How does Lawdingo connect people?

We're able to provide consumers with the experience of being on the phone with a lawyer who is familiar with the laws surrounding their particular need, literally two minutes after having come to the website, anywhere in the country, for free. How we manage to do that is our little secret, but I'll say that we've done some pretty crazy stuff with telephony, calendar integrations and payments.

Do you find working the legal startup space difficult as a non-lawyer?

Surprisingly not. I think in general, insiders of any industry are quick to mistake the way things are with the way things are meant to be. As an analytical outsider with nothing to lose I can examine the legal industry more objectively and spot a bunch of obvious ways it should be better. Also, as someone who to this day still knows quite little about the law itself, I've built a product that assumes you know nothing about the law too, and that makes for a more widely-appealing experience.

Any ethical considerations?

Sure, yeah, I certainly considered the rules of legal ethics as I designed the product. Specifically, we're not splitting fees, there are no referrals per the definition of a referral, and the company itself doesn't provide legal advice. And for participating lawyers, it's their responsibility to use the same level of professional responsibility with Lawdingo clients as they would with clients who they meet through any other means.

What we do is facilitate the discovery, communication and transactions between consumers and licensed attorneys. From a user experience perspective, the way we've combined these processes is just magical, but from the specific standpoint of legal ethics, there's nothing new here, and that's by design.

What's your biggest challenge?

I would say that figuring out the right economic model while trying to scale has been a challenge. It's complicated because we're facilitating initial legal consultations, which for both parties is of huge value, but is traditionally offered for free. That's compounded by our need to have great lawyer and client coverage in every state in every practice area right off the bat. you can't charge for inclusion if you want to build a big network. You also can't charge for transactions because they will happen off the platform anyway and are hard to track.

So how do you make money? 

All lawyers want to grow their practice. We provide them with high quality, paying clients that they couldn't get any other way. They're literally stealing business from bigger firms because increasingly, consumers prefer the convenience of Lawdingo to the vastness of larger firms.

How about clients who want a good lawyer?

Good is subjective! We try to help users define what good is for them. For some it's other users' ratings, and we have a whole reputation system that does that. For others it's price, proximity to them, immediate availability or something else, and we have lots of filters for all of those. As of very recently, users can also connect their LinkedIn account to see which lawyers they share common connections with.

Functionality aside, I've found that a lawyers' interpersonal skills seem to have a lot more to do with a client's assessment of a lawyer than does the lawyer's intimate knowledge of the law. And I think that even in a quick 5 to 10 minute phone call, both a lawyer and a client can get a sense for the character of the person on the other line. All this makes Lawdingo a great tool for finding the right fit between clients and lawyers without the hassle of driving from law office to law office.

What's your greatest success so far?

By number of lawyers on the platform, Lawdingo would now be a among the top 25 law firms in the world. And it's still just me running everything! So that's pretty cool.

As an entrepreneur, is it hard being solo?

Yes, it's hard. I work insane hours, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I'd like to be the poster child for a whole new way of running a business. Instead of just doing things that need to get done, I try to spend most of my work time putting in places processes that get things done. Importantly, I also think being solo means you can attack a very specific vision free of compromise. I think co-founders' need for agreement produces companies that may sometimes lack clarity of purpose.

If you're not a coder, how do you get the coding done?

I get coding the same way I get done anything I can't do. I get an advisor who knows how to think about it and I contract people who know how to actually do it . So with coding, I have an excellent technical advisor and excellent developers all over the world. It's almost a truism in the startup world that this never works, but I think the quality of my product is evidence to the contrary.

That said, I wouldn't recommend that children try this at home. I happen to have years of experience failing miserably at this, but by now I've sort of become an expert in managing a dispersed global product team.

What advice might you have to aspiring legal entrepreneurs?

Give up and join Lawdingo instead! Ok, just kidding. I think good advice might be to be aware of the weird economic incentives underlie that lawyers' behavior. For example, having time means less billable hours, giving free advice means the potential to land big clients, and so on. My other advice, which isn't specific to legal startups, is to always out-product your competition. Be really specific about how your product adds value. Great products feel invisible, like they aren't even there, and that takes a huge amount of work to achieve.

Lawful.ly: Providing Open-Sourced Annotations for Transactional Documents

Today we feature Chris Murphy, co-founder of Lawful.ly  He perfectly articulated what seems to be the catch-22 in the legal startup field. Legal startups are very different from other startup sectors because they really need some basis of legal experience to go off of. At the same time, the old guard with the experience isn't willing, for the most part, to adopt new innovations, while the younger attorneys are open to it, but lack the experience. "The key," Chris says, "is for the young lawyers to correctly pinpoint the problem."

Tell me about yourself.

I went to law school late in life, and was a technical consultant before that. I'm a transactional attorney by day, and Lawful.ly is a side project for now. When I started practicing law, I couldn't help but notice how inefficient it was in many ways.  To an extent, I am or was naive to the legal business, so I'm not steeped so deep in the legal tradition that I'm afraid to ask "it's making money, why would I change it?"  I think that complacency brought on by big profits is what makes the legal industry so ripe for disruption.

How did you come up with the idea for Lawful.ly?

At my company, they didn't pay for general access to Lexis Nexis or Westlaw. Consequently, I was trying to double check on some specific language free online and I found that there is a dearth of legal information--or at least good legal information--on the internet. This didn't make sense to me because anywhere else, we can just go to the web and figure out what our problems are.  You can even use WebMD and similar free sites for medical information, which is also a regulated area. But with law, its so hard to find vetted, approved legal information. Bradley had been running into similar issues, and after a few times talking, we decided we should take a crack at trying to be the ones who fixed this issue.

I've talked to other attorneys since then, and looking from the standpoint of a small law firm or solo attorney, they've told me that they run into this issue regularly.  While they're experts in certain areas of law, it would feel uncomfortable having to dive into another field without resorting to, and being charged for, Lexis Nexis or WestLaw, and there is no other way to obtain this information quickly and easily.  We know that for just about every other industry there are websites where you can look up the collective public wisdom, but there really is nothing like that for the law. 

What's has been your inspiration? 

Bradley and I were huge fans of Docracy, which markets itself as the GitHub for legal documents. Docracy has been great at collecting documents, but we found that I didn't want to go through fifty of them to find a good document.  This is significantly more problematic if you are not an attorney and looking to find a good agreement to use.  I thought there must be a better way to tackle this general problem. 

What problem are you trying to tackle?

In our market research, we found that everyone looks for legal documents on the web, including attorneys. 85% of people with legal problems don't talk to an attorney--only 15% do. I think it must be because of the reputation that the legal profession has made for itself. Bradley and I spend lots of time undoing bad agreements. We wanted to find a find a way to keep laypeople from shooting themselves in the foot with bad contracts from online resources or elsewhere, and to arm them to speak to an attorney. As well, we wanted to provide an affordable, modern resource for attorneys who are looking for specific legal information – something in between the Westlaws and Lexis/Nexis's of the world, but definitely above Listservs and the like which are still constantly used by lawyers. 

So what does Lawful.ly do?

Lawful.ly has curated documents with annotated explanations that allow you to get the info you need on those documents. Each annotation is ideally 3-5 sentences (and no more than one paragraph), and you can link it to something else online which provides greater detail if you like. We're providing legal information in a method thats digestable, vetted, and consumer friendly. We think this is important and even in line with the access to justice movement to make legal information freely available, because we're all affected by the law. We want to simplify information and make it available to the public. People shouldn't have to go to law school or pay $500/hr to educate themselves on the laws that affect them in their everyday lives.

There has been a lot of fear-mongering about some sites likes ours, but we want to be very clear that we're not trying to put lawyers out of business. We are trying to return attorneys to being counselors. Instead paying attorneys hundreds of dollars an hour to ask them "what do I do?", we should have clients that ask us specific, pointed questions instead of coming to us for general education. In that way, I believe attorneys will be providing more value to clients.

Any other similar startups?

A similar startup, CaseText, has the same idea of annotating legal texts, but they are doing that to case law.  I think we have very similar ideas, but focused on solving different problems, or at least problems for different customer segments.  We are supportive of anyone trying to innovate in the legal arena, however, and have found the legal innovation community to be really supportive of just about all ideas and companies.

What was your initial idea?

Lawful.ly is actually pretty close to the initial concept. I had been looking for an explanation on the web for some standard legal language that was being used in a different context, but couldn't find anything helpful without going to one of the legal research services. It was really hard to find anything on the web on the topic at all.  

Generally, I think that standard transactional documents ought to be open-sourced.  However, even with that, there are big gaps between having the document (which you easily find online) and understanding what it means and how it affects you. I found out that its hard to find good legal information unless you want to pay thousands of dollars. Lawful.ly is targeting the community of solo/small firms and end users who wouldn't or couldn't pay that amount anyway.

How are you planning to monetize?

We are still investigating a number of routes to monetize. We're committed to the idea that the access to information must remain free. However, we don't want to make this a non-profit, at least at this stage, since we feel that brings on some burdensome administrative duties and limits certain options and opportunities.

What has been your biggest success?

We've gotten really good responses from the people we talked to about this. Every person we talk to, including most attorneys who are younger and more open, really understand the need. When we talked to people at SXSW they totally got it! It's nice to have an idea where its clear that there's a gap in the market. We've also been able to get a number of attorneys on board. 

How old is Lawful.ly?

We launched our private beta in July 2013. We anticipate moving to a public beta soon, but we want to add a few more features first.

What has been your biggest challenge?

Time and funding. Time because its a side business, and funding because we're bootstrapping it. There are some revenue models out there that we believe will absolutely work, but they requires a certain minimum set of users to prove it out.  We need to be able to get to a certain level of traction on our own funding before we can attract outside investors.

How are you attracting users?

Bradley and I have tried to cultivate a select group for our private beta through social media and our community ties. Bradley is very active in social media, and we're both connected in the local legal community. We wanted 100-200 attorney users, and not just laymen, because we wanted people to provide real feedback. We are intentionally trying not to blow it out yet. We're focused on depth and getting good commentary. We want to be deep, not wide.

Any advice for the aspiring legal entrepreneur?

Do your market research. Always ask, don't just go on a hunch. Hunches are a great way to get started, but you need to verify everything. Ask 50 different people in each of your target markets. I had tried to do another startup in a different area, and one of many lessons I learned is to make sure you're really tackling a pain people have, and not just something you think is a problem. Otherwise, you may end up building something people don't need.

Anything else?

If you start a legal startup, do it in the name of changing the way lawyers provide service so that it enhances the client's experience. This profession has to evolve and there is fantastic opportunity out there. Hopefully we'll be part of it. Change will happen. Successful lawyers in the future will either be part of that change, or at least embrace the change and get pulled along with the tide. If not, they may end up being washed out.