It’s been an axiom of mine for a long time: everybody wants justice, but you’ve have to have the money to buy it. And for bootstrapping startups and microISVs, lawyering up even when you desperately need to has been too damn expensive.
Legal River, a new Washington D.C based startup is standing that on its head. Instead of a sellers market based on relying on recommendations of friends or the local bar association, Legal River has created a buyers market. At Legal River you anonymously post your requirements for free and within a business day bids by attorneys with their experience, price (fixed or hourly), and Legal River references start arriving. No more paying five grand for ten minutes with a partner while your file actually ends up on some paralegal’s desk.
The attorneys who Legal River vets and change per bid tend to be attorneys who have spun off their own practices after years of toiling in large legal firms and use and understand technology: You’ll can get the key legal advice you need, not a suit filling in the same ZoomLegal.com forms you could figure out.
Whether it’s drafting a partnership agreement that won’t have you at each other’s throats, forming your business or protecting your intellectual property, Legal River lets you get what you need at a reasonable price.
Four other things you should know about Legal River:
- They offer free Privacy Policy and Terms of Service generators, vetted by the law firm of General Counsel P.C.
- They’ve launched an answerboard like Stack Overflow or Answers.Onstartups.com just for business owners (including startups and microISVs) with U.S. law questions. While the attorneys answering questions there can’t dispense free legal advise, that can give you accurate, timely and experienced advice about the law, and they’ve vetted as real live attorneys by Legal River.
- In conjuntion with General Counsel P.C., Legal River and yours truly there’s a contest at Answer.LegalRiver.com this week: the Startup or MicroISV who gets the most votes for their question gets one full hour of legal services from General Counsel P.C. and a full year subscription to StartupToDo.com. More details here.
- There will be more info up at this week’s Startup Success Podcast as we interview Ben Hatten, founder of Legal River. That should be available Wednesday.
Here’s a post in the New York Times about how Legal River works.
Legal River is only for Business legal matters, and only works with U.S. based attorneys, although since they soft-launched in October have helped several overseas companies find local representation.
Not sure if you need a lawyer? Do any of these practice catigories ring a bell with you?
- Business Formation
- Contracts
- Mergers and Acquisitions
- Employment
- Real Estate
- Intellectual Property
- Government Contracting
- Internet / E-Commerce
- Corporate Tax
- Bankruptcy
- Arbitration / Mediation
- Regulatory Compliance
7 comments
Join the conversationMike - January 25, 2010
Bob – would be great if you can ask Ben in the interview the following:
1. How did they initially contact and attract the lawyers to sign up for their service? (In detail)
2. With all the other legal directories out there, how did they get the attention of lawyers and what was the big factor in winning them over?
3. How are they going to make money?
4. The teams background and experience with startups.
Look forward to the podcast!
Bob Walsh - January 25, 2010
Mike – we covered those points and more! (nice to know we’ve asked the questions our readers/listeners what to know about).
-Bob
Ann S. Utterback - January 25, 2010
Thanks for putting this valuable information up, Bob. I’ll be interested to hear your interview.
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Jeff - January 28, 2010
There was a site that did this in the 90’s called SharkTank.com.
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A small startup giveaway…
Bob Walsh August 24, 2010[ 4:31 PM PT – update: Carla just upped the ante to 6 from 4, so Karl, you’re in and there’s one more left.]
The one thing every self-respecting startup founder needs is snazzy new business cards, so let me pass on to you an offer from Carla San Gaspar at Uprinting.com, an online printing company. The first four people to comment on this post will get 250 Die Cut Business Cards from Uprinting.com, free.
These are real business cards, not the cheesy kind with “printed by Acme printer” on the back. Here’s the details:
read moreIt’s new, hot and matters: the Lean Startup Methodology
Bob Walsh May 11, 2010For years, startups and their founders have built their products, then searched for their markets and prayed for the best. I won’t dignify this as a methodology – it’s rolling the dice, hopefully with somebody else’s money.
If you want to roll the dice, go to Vegas. If you want to build a successful business producing software, then now is the time to learn about the Lean Startup approach.
In one short year, Lean Startup has gone from a keynote at one Web 2.0 Expo to its own full-blown conference streamed to no less than 50 meetups around the world. That’s what’s called traction in Silicon Valley, and the creators of the Lean Startup approach – Eric Ries, Steve Blank, Sean Ellis, Dave McClure, and others are on to something Big.
The Lean Startup approach puts front and center finding the intersection between the founder’s interests, deep domain knowledge and passion and the market. Though building rapid prototypes and learning from prospective customers what’s working and what’s not, a Lean Startup does its homework to find Product/Market fit before investing in a complete product.
Instead of buying into the traditional industrial model of having separate departments (or at least separate roles) for product development and marketing/sales/pr, a Lean Startup has a product team (development, QA, operations) and a problem team “that is asking the bigger questions, such as: Who will our customers be? What problem does our product solve for them? How many of them are there? And how will we reach them?” (see this post by Eric Ries)
“And the problem team is not merely engaged in a series of whiteboard exercises. Rather, they are working to validate or refute their hypotheses, and to then share their findings with the rest of the company so they can be used to reduce uncertainty and further chart the firm’s destiny. Each iteration leads to a “pivot” in which the company systematically changes some part of the vision to adapt to reality.”
What we are talking about is post-industrial model of product development and marketing here: putting learning what the market has to say before all the blood, toil, sweat, tears and money is spent, not after.
So how does a Lean Startup learn? By taking a fact-based approach and leaving faith-based to others. Lean Startups are numbers driven, and built atop of a development environment (continuous integration, continuous deployment, massive automated tests and more) that supports feature testing in depth by your customers, and using real analytics to understand what they experience.
If some of this sounds familiar, it’s because Lean Startup has a lot to do with applying the best practices of lean manufacturing with true continuous improvement. It’s taking the Toyota Way instead of the GM crash and burn approach.
Here’s a few places you can go to learn more quick and easy:
Now you can ignore Lean Startup. It’s your startup. And maybe you’ll do alright. But the most practical thing in the world is a good theory, and Lean Startup is well on its to being the Next Big Thing and as important a theory to what we do in this industry as Agile Development. Don’t take my word for it – read what Kent Beck, the creator of Extreme Programming, Test Driven Development, and one of the 17 original signatories of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, has to say.
read moreInvoluntary exactitude is involuntary servitude.
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We are far better at dealing with 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288 than “a little more than 3” so we don’t look for good enough, we want the best. The One True Answer.
For example,
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with looking for the best solutions when you build your startup – an absolutely zero chance you will find those answers outside of your codebase.
Best? By what standard? For who? In what context? In a world where there are programmers still at each other’s throats over whether VIm or Emacs “rules” setting your standard for what you’re going to attempt to an impossible degree of certainty is just another way of dodging the bullet you fire when you try to build something new, exciting and daring.
Defining the “best” process is a worthy and profitable way of making car seats by the million when the few less than best, the more money you make. But you’re building one software business, with probably one application and definitely one chance to get more business answers right than wrong. You can’t afford best – what you need is what will work for you, get that item off your multi-thousand entry To Do List and will let you move on.
Save the precision for your code, where it can do some good.
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