Rocket
Lawyer, the Google-backed online legal documents business, formally launches in
the UK today. It will sell consumers and
businesses annual packages of legal forms and documents starting at £40 for
individual users and £100 for businesses, and is aimed principally at small
businesses and start-ups which wish to keep costs of legal compliance to a
minimum.
Legal
document businesses tread a fine line in the need to avoid holding themselves
out as the providers of legal advice without the necessary licences, and to
avoid this problem Rocket Lawyer has signed up 20 law firms in the UK to its ‘On
Call’ panel for those customers who need legal advice rather than simply
documents. The panel firms include Butterworth
Solicitors, Freeman Harris Solicitors, and Glaisyers.
So
will the venture succeed? It certainly
seems to be making waves in the US, where the business was launched. In an interview with Forbes last year, founder
Charley Moore claimed that in the US the company has 70,000 users a day and had
doubled revenue for four years in a row to more than $10 million in 2011. That
is impressive growth by any standards, and as a consequence the business has attracted investment from Google Ventures and Investor Growth Capital.
Rocket
Lawyer is not the only business to have identified the opportunity to provide
legal documents at a low cost. LegalZoom
began offering legal documents to the public in the US back in 2001, and in
September 2012 it was announced that they had formed a partnership with the
United Kingdom-based legal services provider QualitySolicitors
(backed by Palamon Capital Partners) as part of which the companies will
jointly offer online legal services in the United Kingdom including company
formations and divorce documents.
LegalZoom claims to have over a million customers and, like Rocket
Lawyer, has the backing of very significant businesses and individuals. So ferocious has the fight for market
share between these two companies become that LegalZoom have recently launched
a legal action against Rocket Lawyer for false and misleading advertising.
It
seems therefore that the principle of what LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer are
doing has been proven to work in the US.
Is there any reason to think it will be different in the UK?
One
area of disappointment for me is that in relation to its UK launch, Rocket
Lawyer is making a woefully small number of documents initially available. Although the range of documents will
undoubtedly increase over time I can’t help but think it is a mistake to launch
with such a small number, as it will give those who are attracted early to look
at the service a very poor impression.
It remains to be seen how many documents LegalZoom will cover at launch.
In
fact, this type of service is nothing new in the UK. Businesses such as Simply Docs (with which I
have no connection, other than as a satisfied user) have been offering the
online document service for many years, and have over 2,200 documents in their database,
which makes the Rocket Lawyer initial offering look even more paltry, although
the latter would differentiate its service through the ability to get legal
advice if required through its lawyer panel.
The reality is that even though the databank of Simply Docs may be far
more extensive than its newer rivals, the cash backing that Rocket Lawyer and
LegalZoom enjoy, together with their high profile and well connected Board
members, means that they can expect to make an impact on the UK market.
Thanks for sharing such a nice information about the legal services. A lawyer can offer services in many different fields of law. There are many different cases that would require the help of a lawyer to getting something resolved.
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