Google Bets on Disrupting the Legal Market

Google’s venture capital arm, Google Ventures, is intent on disrupting the legal market.

First, it invested in LawPivot, a Quora-style Q&A platform for providing legal advice to businesses. LawPivot has now opened its platform to the public, allowing lawyers to answer businesses questions in a venue visible to the public.

This new twist on LawPivot’s business model will build up a valuable and publicly-accessible knowledgebase of legal advice for businesses to leverage. LawPivot will also provide lawyers a high-visibility platform to demonstrate their expertise to prospective clients.

Google Ventures has also recently invested in Rocket Lawyer, an online legal document service. Users of Rocket Lawyer’s service can easily generate legal documents – ranging from divorce agreements to incorporation documents – and optionally pay an additional fee to have a lawyer review the document.

While the Internet has certainly had an impact on the legal market (by way of clients finding lawyers through Google search, for example), the Internet has not yet truly disrupted the business model of running a law firm or, for that matter, being a lawyer. Google Ventures is betting that day is coming, and it clearly wants to be in the thick of the disruption.

Comments

  1. I just don’t see this working.

    Legal advice doesn’t scale.

    Experts start off very keen, then they realize how much work that they are putting in, for little return and leave – but they leave their expert answers behind.

    An expert Q&A model is not the way to scale expert counsel.

  2. Legal advice doesn’t scale?

    That’s what they said about Legal Zoom that has now done over 1 million wills.

    Some types of legal advice doesn’t scale, but there certainly seem to be exceptions.