Editor's blog | Commodity brokers

Law as a commodity is still anathema to many solicitors out there. Yet, this is what the future of law is all about, according to Rocket Lawyer founder Charley Moore. And not just that; law is going to be data driven and it is going to be social, Moore said as he officially launched his business’s UK platform on Wednesday. This, in effect, is the first law brokering service, giving users access to free forms and precedents, connecting them with lawyers for specific advice, and integrating with users’ Facebook and LinkedIn data.

At present there are only about 60 forms on the Rocket Lawyer UK’s site, but they are aiming to roughly double it by this time next year. Even then it is unlikely to cover the number of everyday situations that potentially call for legal documents. It is also fewer than those available on other providers but this is not the point.

The launch took place at Google’s Tech City premises in London’s Shoreditch. There is something vaguely infectious about the disruptive spirit prevailing around the Silicon Roundabout. The use of words such as ‘campus’ suggests an approach miles away from a 1980s ‘business park’. The lawyers involved with Rocket Lawyer are not ‘panel firms’, they are a ‘lawyer community’. It talks about doing things differently, about innovation and imagination in business. And after setting up its own range of legal documents, Rocket Lawyer will develop the portfolio by crowdsourcing more forms and precedents from law firms.

The integration with social media also looked impressive. Moore was almost evangelical about it, showing how, as an SME manager, you could pull in an employment contract into your Rocket Lawyer dashboard, import from LinkedIn the details of the employee you are connected to, send the contract for review to a lawyer in the network, and from there email it to your new staff member.

But as the sense of amazement abated, one question was left: would this actually be any use in the real world? How different is this really from existing intranet and extranet technology which has been around for about 15 years? And if matters such as shareholder agreements or the protection of intellectual property rights are so important to my start up, surely I will want to spend time with lawyers – that is, chargeable time – to make sure my business is actually bullet proof. And that’s even before we consider contentious work.

There is a lesson for law firms nonetheless. Clients are no longer prepared to pay experienced lawyers just for filling in a form when they can do it themselves at no or little cost. What the likes of Rocket Lawyer, LegalZoom, Saga or the Co-op are doing is to offer clients a new type of relationship. One where standard legal documents are treated as generic information and used as a marketing tool: clients with questions about how to fill a form are more likely to contact the service provider that has originated it than its competitors.

About 80 firms in the UK are offering forms online on their websites – many using the services of document-assembly company Epoq. Epoq pioneered this model about ten years ago and it is astonishing that so few law firms have embraced the technology when new entrants – Saga or the AA, for instance – have made it a core part of their business. With this sort of competition on their doorsteps or just a few clicks away online, law firms could do worse than start putting their own precedents on their websites and make sure they remain within earshot of potential clients.