There’s no doubt that the success of startups like Quora have propelled the Q&A space into the spotlight. And there seems to be room for other niche Quora-like sites, such as enterprise-focsued Opzi and recently launched LawPivot, which provides crowdsourced legal advice to technology companies. Today LawPivot is announcing that it has secured $600,000 in new funding from Google Ventures and a number of angel investors, including Richard Chen, David Tisch, David Li, Nick Mehta and Don Hutchison. This brings LawPivot’s total funding to $1 million (the startup previously raised $400,000 in angel funding).
LawPivot is essentially a “Quora for legal advice” that allows technology companies to confidentially ask legal questions to expert attorneys. Questions are completely confidential, so companies still have privacy within the platform. The startup was co-founded by a team of lawyers and tech execs, including Jay Mandal, a lead mergers and acquisitions attorney at Apple; Nitin Gupta; an intellectual property litigation lawyer; and Steven Kam, a software engineer and architect with experience as an intellectual property litigation lawyer. Clearly, these guys have experience in advising tech companies on how to navigate the law.
The company also unveiled its new product, LawPivot Recommendations, a personalized recommendation algorithm that connects a company to the best lawyers to answer its legal questions. As companies interact with LawPivot over time, the site’s technology will uses past and present data on users and trends to provide a company the best lawyers to answer its question based on the company’s specific needs.
The incentive for lawyers, says Gupta, is that LawPivot is a way for lawyers to create new business and market themselves to potential clients. In the future, LawPivot also plans to offer companies business development advice in a Q&A format.
LawPivot is currently offering a free trial to California companies, and LawPivot is free for
California lawyers but eventually companies will be charged for advices, and lawyers will be charged for leads.
Aswe wrote in our initial review, the site seems like it could be a very useful tool for startups and mid-sized companies that many not be able to afford high-priced legal advice. And LawPivot can also be used as a way for any-sized companies to find lawyers with particular expertise in certain fields of law.