Google Ventures-backed LawPivot is blending a Q&A platform with legal advice for businesses, and allows technology companies and startups to confidentially ask legal questions to expert attorneys. But until now, LawPivot has kept the legal communications on its site private, so that only the lawyer and business can access this information. Today, the startup is releasing a public-facing Q&A platform to allows businesses to also ask questions publicly and receive answers from the LawPivot community of users nationwide.
For background, LawPivot 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.
On LawPivot Public Q&A, legal experts in specialties like corporate, intellectual property, contracts, employment, tax, and immigration law, can share their expertise and insights with businesses by publicly answering legal questions raised by the LawPivot community.
Of course, businesses can still ask private questions, but this creates a way for lawyers to publish their legal recommendations (and perhaps get more business) and allows startups to build a resource for fellow businesses to use when looking for answers to similar questions. For example, many boot-strapped entrepreneurs could use the public product has a way to get advice for non-complicated matters.
As we’ve written in the past, the startup encourages lawyers to create comprehensive profiles on LawPivot, companies know where their legal advice is coming from. LawPivot will also connects a company to the best-suited 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 company is also releasing an infographic detailing the most popular legal topics on LawPivot, including a word visualization cloud showing the relative frequency of certain topics raised by businesses on LawPivot in describing the nature of their questions on the site. The most popular legal questions asked on LawPivot are in the areas or corporate law, intellectual property, contracts and Internet law.
The online legal space is growing fast, and companies like Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom are raising hefty funding rounds. While LawPivot focuses on more of a niche community, the site still has the potential to disrupt the legal space for the business world.
