Tech changing the legal game
Smartphone apps are bringing advice and documents to the masses
Joey Mucha used to seal a business deal with a handshake or an email. Now he whips out his smartphone.
The San Francisco entrepreneur runs a side business renting out skee ball machines. With the company growing steadily, Mr. Mucha decided last year he needed to use contracts to protect his clients and the business.
But he didn’t go to a pricey lawyer. Instead, the 27-year-old downloaded a smartphone application called Shake. It guided him through the process of creating easy-to-read contracts, which customers can then sign with a swipe of their fingers on the screen.
“I don’t make enough money to pay $250 an hour for a lawyer to draft a contract,” Mr. Mucha said. “But I needed something to use as a defense in a scenario where I wasn’t paid, without hiring a lawyer or trying to write my own contract.”
Technology is creeping ever faster into the $200 billion U.S. legal field, shaking up an industry that has long been defined by tradition and dominated by white-shoe firms.
Law firms already are adapting to seismic shifts in the industry. The collapse of several big ones and the downsizing of many other firms during the economic turmoil left thousands of lawyers out of work. Survivors faced a stark new landscape in which clients demanded more flexibility and an alternative to the tradition of billing by the hour.
Industry experts say the industry is ripe for big tech shake-ups, including new innovations on social media and apps for smartphones and tablets.
“As software becomes more intelligent, we will have digital apps that can either substitute for the labor of lawyers or will assist a lawyer in being more productive,” said Richard Granat, co-director of the Center for Law Practice Technology at Florida Coastal School of Law.
The Shake app launched in September with options to create six kinds of contracts, including freelancing, renting, lending money and a write-it-yourself feature.
The app walks users through a series of questions — Who are the two parties? How much money is involved? — and automatically fills in an agreement stripped of unnecessary legal language.
“It’s like TurboTax” for the law, said Abe Geiger, founder and chief executive of Shake Inc. “Legal becomes less of a hurdle when contracts are not long and full of jargon.”
Mr. Geiger, whose wife is a lawyer, said he was inspired to create Shake after seeing the inefficiency of law firms, coupled with demand for legal services by the growing ranks of freelancers and entrepreneurs. The sharing economy — in which people earn extra cash by renting out their cars, apartments and free time to strangers — has also boosted the need for cost-effective legal help.
“The deals that happen are more quick and spontaneous,” Mr. Geiger said. “You meet someone on Craigslist in a parking lot, a lot of freelancers meet clients in coffee shops, and they all need simple tools.
“Those people typically can’t afford pricey lawyers but still require sound legal help.”
The demand for legal services from low- to middleincome earners who are priced out of expensive attorneys is an estimated $45 billion “latent” market, experts say. Once ignored by the legal industry, they are now targeted by a growing number of startups eager to roll out innovations designed to win over tech-savvy young people.
Meeting that demand could also help improve the poor labor market for lawyers. Among 2012 law school graduates, 84.7 percent were employed nine months after graduation, according to the National Association for Law Placement. That was down from 91.9 percent in 2007.
“There is a huge mismatch of supply and demand in the U.S.,” said John Suh, chief executive of LegalZoom.com Inc. “We have an oversupply of law graduates every year, but for whatever reason, the price has not come down to where most Americans can afford it.”
Mr. Suh believes that technology can help change that.
His Glendale, Calif., company, which provides legal documents online and connects clients to lawyers, started a research-and- development group in Silicon Valley in 2011. After nixing a plan to go public this year, Mr. Suh said LegalZoom is focused on rolling out new tech products, including a smartphone app.