(The Legal Hero Team)
Startups seeking legal advice received good news Wednesday. Legal Hero announced the launch of its services, made possible with the help of a newly-closed $715,000 seed round.
Founded by Annie Webber, a graduate of Harvard Law and Harvard Business School, Legal Hero provides small businesses and startups with access to vetted lawyers and affordably priced legal projects that cover common areas, such as intellectual property, real estate and employment law.
Say a startup needs a confidentiality agreement: A team member can go online, find that project and agree to a clear cost, whether it's $150 to review an existing agreement or $375 to draft up a new one. Once a project is selected, users are presented with a series of lawyers they can then choose to work with.
Clients can track the status of their project via Legal Hero's dashboard, and aren't charged until the work is complete. Once it is, clients are asked to leave a detailed review of the lawyer they collaborated with, so Legal Hero can ensure their database features a first-rate network.
"We're not building a commodity," Webber said. "We are focused on getting the best lawyers so startups know they're always getting the highest quality."
Legal Hero is available nationwide for intellectual property and immigration projects. Roughly two dozen other projects are also live for New York and Massachusetts, the two states the startup boasts offices.
Webber (right) said the team has a plan for expansion, and will be growing Legal Hero's lawyer network and project base, as well as start moving in to new states. While in beta, Webber noted they were able to grow out their own team, which features a blend of startup and legal expertise.
The business side of the team is comprised of former lawyers; Dan Devoe, Legal Hero's director of marketing worked as a litigator at Ropes & Gray before joining alcohol delivery startup Drizly, while Matt Glick, the director of legal operations served as a corporate finance attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell prior to working at Guatemalan social entrepreneurship cultivator Alterna.
Webber herself grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. Her father started Continental Flowers in Miami in the 1970s, which members of her family are still involved in growing today. She enrolled in law and business school with an awareness of the struggles small businesses face and, because of that awareness, was regularly asked by her peers for legal advice. Upon graduating, she, too, started working at Ropes & Gray, where she saw the other side of the process.
One one end, startups' struggles were real and questions persistent. On the other, her large law firm wasn't operating as efficiently as it could be, using complicated enterprise software to keep track of how much to charge a client. Legal Hero was then born as the bridge between the two.
"Small business legal services is a $60 billion industry," Webber said, "and two-thirds of businesses didn't consult a lawyer at all in the last year. One of the most cited reasons is fear and intimidation of the process. We want to eliminate that fear and make it simple and straightforward for businesses."
To prove that, the team is focused on creating a content platform, complete with whitepapers, guides and calculators, that provides helpful legal information to its clients. Legal Hero will also be partnering with fellow organizations who assist small businesses to host workshops and meetups.
"We all about making law simple for businesses," Webber said. "We provide experienced, vetted lawyers, so businesses can focus on what's most important to them."
Images via Legal Hero
