Legal questions about the establishing, incorporating, or funding a startup are among the most common that entrepreneurs have. There’s perhaps a distrust of lawyers and a sense that legal advice will be too costly. As we’ve written about before, LawPivot tackles this problem by providing a place where startups can ask legal questions and get crowdsourced answers from qualified lawyers. By doing so, LawPivot lowers some of the barriers that startups might face – legal and logistical – when trying to find a lawyer.
Up until now, this service has only been available in California, but LawPivot announces today that it’s opening availability nationwide.
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LawPivot’s co-founders, Jay Mandal and Nitin Gupta, are both lawyers. Mandal was the lead of Apple’s mergers and acquisitions team, and Gupta was an IP attorney at a several national firms. They bring to the table, then, an understanding of the needs of entrepreneurs and lawyers, the latter of whom are finding their own profession changing and are needing new ways to develop their businesses.
Both businesses and lawyers can register on the site, which is unveiling its new product today. This includes better profiles for lawyers, which will include information about how frequently they answer questions on the site and by extension what their online reputation is like. Lawyers can also add background information to their profiles.
All of this is in the service of making it easier to match businesses and attorneys, and LawPivot has improved the searching capabilities on the site so that it’s easier to identify lawyers based on their responsiveness, quality, contribution to the community and legal expertise.
As always, and unlike other Q&A sites, the questions you pose to LawPivot are confidential. You tag your questions with relevant keywords, which helps the site’s recommendation engine identify the best lawyers for the job. It’s the addition of recommendations and algorithms to this sort of online inquiry that LawPivot’s Gupta describes as “the next direction of Q&A.”
The site is still free, but following its free trial period, LawPivot will charge companies on either a per question or per monthly basis.
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