Lawdingo, The Startup That Lets You Talk To Lawyers Instantly, Joins YC | Hacker News Reader

Lawdingo, The Startup That Lets You Talk To Lawyers Instantly, Joins YC

techcrunch.com

59 pointsnirmel15 comments

This looks neat.

Say I was starting a small dev consultancy, and what I wanted to figure out was, "what lawyer should I use to review the master agreements I get from each new client?"

Could I use Lawdingo to cheaply audition a bunch of different lawyers for contract reviews? In that situation, my long-term goal would be to find 1-2 lawyers I could consistently use every time I had new paper to review. I might want to compare the markups I get from different lawyers on the same contract.

I'm not asking for me (now that we're part of a public company we apparently have faucets that shoot lawyers out of them) but this is a question I've gotten from lots of friends trying to figure out how to do contract review correctly, instead of just hoping they aren't getting screwed.

Great use case to think about. It is definitely suited for interviewing multiple lawyers in a short amount of time. Our primary focus is on the initial legal consultation, which lends itself directly identifying the one or more lawyers you want to work with long-term.

I think there's probably market traction not only in capturing people who are looking for a lawyer, but in getting people who should be consulting lawyers more often.

Maybe there's a way to standardize the offering to get some of that usage; instead of "chat with a lawyer", "upload a contract" or something.

I think this is a very real problem you're working on, and it has the nice property of being a problem that is common not only to startups but to small tech businesses of all sorts.

Interestingly, we see far more usage among people with family, criminal, personal injury, landlord-tenant, and other normal-people cases than startups/businesses. I suppose it should not be a surprise that many orders of magnitude more people get divorced than decide to start a startup.

I do like the upload documents idea, though, and we'll explore that and get there soon enough.

I'd imagine a majority of the questions being asked have to reference most legal documents. A couple of examples I think in my own recent memory:

  1. Term sheet / Letter of Intent Review
  2. Am I supposed to pay X% in taxes this year? (need to see a tax form)
  3. Is my landlord screwing me for making me pay X amount after I've moved out? (need to provide the lease)
  4. What happens in the UK SEIS scheme if the company fails? (need to review SEIS scheme details)

A majority of the law (albeit very minute) that I've encountered, the first thing I usually have to do is fill out a questionnaire. I wonder if you could also get lawyers to provide sample questionnaires to at least get the background information.

As my most recent accountant visit said to me "I don't want to do the donkey work if you can do it yourself. You shouldn't have to pay for that." This should be no different for lawyers. The value is much more transparent then. I suppose that's your overall goal, no?

Site looks nice...good luck!

Hi nirmel

Sorry to tack this on here, but any chance I can give you a call or an email? Wanted to ask you a couple questions as I'm developing a product in this field as well (don't think it competes with lawdingo).

Bruno

Sure - nikhil@lawdingo.com

This seems like a great concept.

Everyone needs a lawyer, at some point. And with the dearth of new Law grads out there, there is supply. Get international!

awesome! Just proofs that against all odds, traction is still the most important metric to show success for an early stage startup

good luck Nikhil

this is surprisingly cool.. I need lawyers with international specialization though.. as soon as you guys hit this, i'm on board

Neat how the founder is using his status as a single-founder instead of part of a team to get buzz in the media.

SEC needs more lawyers -- three weeks waiting time to speak to a lawyer is far too long.

So...basically this is just an Avvo clone using Rails/Bootcamp, minus a lot of client development features, and...more expensive?

Competition for legal services is a good thing, but all this really has going for it right now is the name.

It looks like using Avvo.com is more like StackOverflow - it is a Q & A site that claims not to create a lawyer-client relationship between the lawyer and someone who asks a question on the site.

LawDingo seems to let you actually become a client of a lawyer and consult with them in private, which gives you much more legal protection, and seems to be a completely different thing.

Maybe you should try using Avvo before you make that comparison?

Both Avvo and LawDingo provide initial consult meetings. The difference is that Avvo also provides general Q&A, lawyer ratings, and a referral service (separate from the client service, targeted at lawyers seeking clients).

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