Rocket Lawyer launches in UK with vows to fight LegalZoom lawsuit
Founder Moore brands move 'a frivolous lawsuit as a competitive tactic'
Rocket Lawyer’s founder Charley Moore (pictured) has vowed to defend the lawsuit started by LegalZoom last week, accusing its rival of “frivolous” tactics.
Speaking minutes before the launch of Rocket Lawyer UK at Google’s Shoreditch campus, the former Latham and Watkins lawyer, said he would focus on building “the best legal site ever created” and dismissed LegalZoom’s move as “wasteful”.
Moore, whose experience with tech businesses goes back to advising Yahoo when it was a three-man startup, said Rocket Lawyer’s mission was to make the law “affordable and simple”.
There was nothing his business respected more than innovation, Moore went on, saying that it was a shame that LegalZoom, which unveiled plans to plans to enter the UK market in September, rather than innovating decided to use “a frivolous lawsuit as a competitive tactic”.
“It’s pretty clear that this is exactly what they did. We were a tiny little company of about three people in the beginning of 2008... We have the same model… in classic Silicon valley startup story.”
Moore said Rocket Lawyer had since reached position 72 on the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing American private companies and ranked the fifth fastest growing software company in the US, and that it was only then that LegalZoom took notice of them.
“It’s only after we’ve grown, after the independent company www.compete.com said more people used Rocket Lawyer than LegalZoom… that LegalZoom decided to sue us for providing free legal information and legal document and – more importantly – affordable access to attorneys.”
Moore said LegalZoom had been around for ten years before he started and that at the time it was not connecting consumers to lawyers but instead competed with them, which had resulted in LegalZoom facing litigation for unauthorised practice of law.
Unlike existing form and precedent providers at the time, Moore said he wanted to make lawyers “more productive, more efficient and more effective online”.
“Lawsuits and litigation are an important part of justice but they can be abused. Now we’re going to see abuse of the legal system play out, and when we prevail, the way is going to be clear for something that lawyers are passionate about, and that is providing legal assistance affordably.”
Moving on to unveiling the Rocket Lawyer UK service, Moore said unlike numerous other legal websites, the new service was not about legalease.
He said pricing was transparent, with some products free and others not.
The Rocket Lawyer UK website will give user access to about 60 forms to start with and will integrate with users’ Facebook, LinkedIn and other social platforms such as Google+.
Moore said if he was coming out of law school today he would be thinking about networking, “because times have changed – we do business with the people we are connected with on social networks”.
He went on: “Legal documents are just legal data; you’re going to see a different way of practising law, a different way of working with the client.”
He said employers recruiting individuals they had connected with on a platform such as LinkedIn could bring their details together into an employment contract on their Rocket Lawyer’s legal dashboard and from there send the contract for review to their lawyer.
“This is the future of law. Law is entering the data age; it’s going to be data driven, it’s going to be social,” he said.
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