Legal Research

LawPivot: Crowdsourcing Legal Advice

By Jack Newton

While Q&A sites have been around for as long as the web, the last year has seen a tremendous surge of innovation in this space. Quora is one of the hottest startups in the valley right now, and has experts in various fields answering questions on everything from “Why is Dropbox more popular than tools with similar functionality?” to “Why is honey dangerous for babies?”.

LawPivot brings the Quora concept to legal advice, allowing companies to confidentially ask legal questions of lawyers that have registered with the site. LawPivot employs a recommendation algorithm that will match the company and the question it has with the best lawyers best suited to answer its question, and the company will have the benefit (or the curse) of receiving answers to its questions from several lawyers.

The startup promises to deliver companies high-quality legal advice at a lower cost via its crowdsourcing model. Given the tremendous success of Quora, I see no reason to think they won’t succeed. Google appears to agree: Google Ventures has just invested in the company.

LawPivot promises to provide a new and innovative way to connect lawyers with clients. While the offering is currently limited to California, the company plans to roll the service out to other parts of the US – and perhaps Canada – in the future.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on January 24, 2011 (boomark / email).