Crowdsourcing Legal Advice with LawPivot
No matter how conservative you are in the expenses of starting up your own business, there is no cost where you truly “get-what-you-pay-for”: legal advice.
Young companies find it hard to scrimp on legal fees because of the current aggressive legal tone set by tech giants such as Apple. Seeing a great opportunity, lawyer Jay Mandal quit his merger and acquisition post at Apple to start LawPivot, a website that gives tech entrepreneurs affordable legal advice.
How LawPivot Works
According to their website, legal advice is just 3 steps away:
- Send your confidential legal question on LawPivot.
- LawPivot identifies the relevant lawyers for your question.
- Receive multiple answers from lawyers, saving money and time.
While this idea may appear simple, keep in mind that most startups don’t have either the time or money to seek legal advice. Bootstrapped organizations are understandably reluctant to cough up $300 to $600 per hour for legal advice, and they generally don’t have time (or personal assistants) to track down the appropriate lawyer for a consultation.
Reliable and Confidential Legal Advice
While the process appears simple on the outside, there is more to it than meets the eye. When you submit a question, the system will ask you to tag it with relevant topics before you securely submit it. LawPivot’s algorithms funnel the questions according to the tags to its list of registered lawyers based on expertise and quality of responses. You will receive an initial list of 10 lawyers and you can select as many lawyers from that list as you want. Only the selected lawyers will have access to your question.
Also, both co-founders Jay Mandal and Nitin Gupta have experience in the legal field. Guta was previously an intellectual property litigation lawyer at Townsend & Townsend & Crew, a top national intellectual property law firm.
The Economics of LawPivot
As of 07/27/11, registered users of LawPivot can ask up to 3 question per month for free and U.S. lawyers can register for free in most U.S. states. LawPivot has indicated to Bloomberg Business Week that they plan to charge a monthly subscription of about $80 in the future.
Crowd-source free legal advice with LawPivot at http://www.lawpivot.com.
By Damian Davila, blogger covering business and marketing at idaconcpts.com. You can read more articles from Damian at SexySocialMedia here. Follow him on Twitter at @idaconcpts.
I am so thankful with LawPivot for their great service. It is one of the most helpful websites for tech entrepreneurs nowadays. I highly recommend each and every entrepreneur to seek assistance with LawPivot due to the fact that the legal service they offer is far more affordable and their service is excellent.
Thanks Evangel. I actually had a couple questions for my own business and it’s incredible how detailed are the answers from the registered lawyers. They don’t make any money from answering questions but definitely build up great rapport with potential clients.
Hi there. Another great info you’ve shared here i see. Thanks a lot!
Very isightful post. LawPivot infos are very common for me.
LawPivot is an excellent provider of legal assistance due tot the fact that they are truly professionals. You will surely love their service because they are highly reliable and all your personal or business information is 100 percent safe, so there’s nothing you should be worried of.