When clients at his law firm would move to other parts of the country, Dan Reilly (a former Rhode Island state representative) often found himself in need of attorneys in those new areas to maintain continuity.
So, he would Google random attorneys, call them out of the blue, agree on the scope and cost of a specific project and then mail them a check once the work was complete.
But it quickly became clear to Reilly that this process was laborious and inefficient, and he figured he wasn’t the only lawyer with this problem.
Reilly would go on to team up with Bill Maya in 2016 to found Legably, a marketplace that connects lawyers for individual projects or freelance work. Legably allows attorneys to post projects they need help on, share documents, discuss the project and pay for work through the platform.
“For most people, it offers an opportunity in a flexible way to gain some additional income here and there."
“It’s not for consumers, but for client matters that attorneys have,” Reilly told Rhode Island Inno. “If they have too much work coming in and need to balance out the workload; if there are specialties that don’t fit within practice area or they need to bring in a specialist … or maybe it’s jurisdictional issues.”
Legably is free to use for lawyers, but the company charges a small fee based on the total budget of the project from the hiring attorney.
Reilly said the platform is geared best for remote work such as document drafting, reviewing, discovery or legal research, but there is a whole range of possibilities.
“Every time we think there is one thing that works really well on the platform, something else pops up as a job that we didn’t really envision,” he said.
Reilly said he has also been surprised by the users.
At first he thought Legably would be very popular among first-year law graduate students looking to jump-start their careers, but has instead found it very appealing to lawyers at the peak or toward the end of their career.
“For most people, it offers an opportunity in a flexible way to gain some additional income here and there,” he said. “They are able to turn it on and off as their schedule permits, and when they have free time, to maximize it and make money.”
There are some similar services out there such as the New York-based legal staffing firm Hire and Esquire. But Reilly said Hire and Esquire is mainly for big law firms, whereas Legably is not a staffing firm and does not offer full-time staffing jobs.
In fact, Legably considers itself a complement to staffing firms that already have relationships with attorneys, who have pipelines of work they need help filling.
Since launching two years ago, Reilly said Legably has about 1,200 attorneys from all over the country using the platform. There has been international interest as well, but that is on hold for now.
Still, considering there are 1 million licensed attorneys in the U.S., the company is always working to onboard new attorneys, particularly in major metro areas, where there are lots of job postings.
Legably raised an angel round of funding in 2017 and is currently in the process of closing a seed round of funding. That money will likely be reinvested back into the product to add new features such as artificial intelligence and machine learning that can better match projects with lawyers.
There is also the possibility of one day launching a parallel service focused on paralegal work, which Reilly said users have expressed interest in.
