I attended Chicago’s TechWeek conference recently and met the team behind LawPivot, a Silicon Valley based startup founded by Jay Mandal, the former lead mergers and acquisitions lawyer for Apple. LawPivot is essentially the Quora of legal advice or for those not as familiar with the tech scene, LawPivot is the Q&A site for your small business legal questions. Brilliant! Why didn’t I think of that? I can’t even count the number of legal questions I’ve had that only required a simple answer in regard to trademarks, privacy policy, legal forms and everything in-between. The answer seems simple, right? Ask a lawyer! Unfortunately, it’s not that simple, especially for first-time entrepreneurs who are still building their professional network and small business owners who can’t afford the high-cost of legal fees. Sound familiar? Fortunately, LawPivot aims to solve both problems.
In a typical Q&A site such as Quora or Yahoo Answers, a person asks a question publicly and other community members post an answer if they have expertise on that subject. Members have an incentive to provide the best possible answer as their credibility is at stake due to the (recommended) use of their real names and identities. The top answer theoretically rises to the top as fellow readers and community members vote up or down on each submission. This Q&A site format is the basic premise for LawPivot, but with a few key differences.
Unlike the other Q&A sites where users post their questions publicly, LawPivot recognized the need for privacy for small business owners seeking legal advice. Whether a new business idea, intellectual property issue or competitive threat, every legal question is submitted confidentially through LawPivot’s submission form. The platform then identifies and contacts the lawyers (the rep I spoke to at TechWeek mentioned this as approximately 10 lawyers) that are most relevant to the inquiry, rather than sending it out to their entire database of lawyers. Alternatively, the small business owner can use the site’s search engine to browse and identify lawyers they’d like to approach on their own rather than using LawPivot’s matching algorithm.
The lawyers who receive an inquiry are incentivized to answer by the prospect of increasing their LawPivot Level score, a measure of a lawyer’s contributions to and engagement with the LawPivot community, and more important to them, the potential of earning new business. The small business owner, on the other hand, receives multiple answers, which can help them determine whether further legal representation is necessary, saving time and money.
The current pricing structure shouldn’t be a deterrent as the service offers a free trial to business owners and is free for lawyers to join. Theoretically, LawPivot is a win-win for both, but the question is whether business owners will find the service of value (I plan to use it the next time I have a legal question.) and whether lawyers can gain enough business to offset the time spent answering questions.
Have you utilized LawPivot or a similar service for your small business legal questions? Share your experience in the comments below.
-To contact the writer on this story: Philip Nowak in Chicago at philip.nowak@firmology.com.
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