Legal widget unsettles dominant online brands

A small micro-payment widget launched today could help lawyers generate instructions and immediate revenue, unsettling along the way the emerging order of online legal advice presently dominated by the likes of Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom.

HonestyBoxx will sit on a firm’s website, allowing potential clients to ask lawyers a question and say how much they are prepared to pay for the answer. There is a minimum of £10 and a maximum of £300, out of which HonestyBoxx will take between 12 and 30 per cent in inverse proportion of the value of the payment.

The principle is similar to forms that some law firms have on their websites which allow clients to contact lawyers with their issues and usually get the first half hour of legal advice free.

But co-founder Linda Cheung (pictured) said her new gizmo will be more efficient at helping law firms filter out worthless time-consuming enquiries because clients must attach a monetary value to their questions.

“With free advice services people don’t come to meetings prepared, they’ve not thought it through,” Cheung told Solicitors Journal. “But if you start putting a value on it, people start behaving differently.”

Cheung and her business partner Mark Bower set up CubeSocial two years ago, a ‘gatekeeper’ platform which allows law firms and other professional services firms to manage their social media presence in one place.

Their latest venture is, she said, “a natural evolution” in their effort to help lawyers leverage the potential of social media and its indirect influence on business relationships.

Demonstrating a return on social media investment is still “an impossible question even today”, Cheung said. “The issue is about building trust, and this is one way for lawyers to show their expertise and for clients to test it for a modest outlay.”

It will also mean firms will generate revenue instantly once the answer is provided, and it will help turn some of these leads into instructions.

The model is an application of the SoLoMo concept – which stands for ‘social, local, mobile’ – which acknowledges that while the internet has a global reach, a significant number of users are searching for services local to them.

“If I want a lawyer in Basingstoke, I will start with an internet search and I will probably want to do certain things online – but I may also want to be able to go and see them,” Cheung said.

According to the former  Morgan Stanley executive, there is usually little that differentiates law firms within a particular segment or locality. In a world where expertise is taken for granted and most firms have decent enough websites, the question is how clients interact with lawyers once they have browsed around the website and are comfortable that a firm can offer the service they require.

The so-lo-mo theme underpins many of the other legal advice businesses that are gradually occupying the online space.

Rocket Lawyer’s ‘Ask A Lawyer’ service is part of its wider offering connecting clients to lawyers. A subscription service, members are entitled to 30 per cent off the fees charged by panel firms and to a free half hour for each new legal matter.

Earlier this year the Google-backed business bought LawPivot, a Quora-style platform which allows web users to post questions for LawPivot’s panel firms to pick up.

More about HonestyBoxx at https://honestyboxx.com.