An Australian online law firm has secured $1.2m in funding from angel investors.
Online law firm LegalVision has secured $1.2m from Australian angel investors.
Run more like a start-up and less like a traditional firm, LegalVision will use the funds to aid its continued growth. The firm will focus on developing their software systems with the investment.
LegalVision CEO Lachlan McKnight said that the firm anticipates growth in 2015. Focussing on a client base of small to medium sized businesses, LegalVision aims to offer a cost effective and time efficient solution to legal work.
“There is a demand for what we are doing. Fixed fee, high quality and quick turnaround, it’s building the technology that will enable us to manage the volume,” he said. “We focus on the space that works for us and that’s providing high quality advice and documentation for a fixed fee working on lower margins.”
While LegalVision is an online firm, the growth of the business has meant that the firm will move to an office with meeting rooms, but is still a long way from the traditional way of doing legal business. McKnight said the firm’s business development strategy is primarily focussed online and enquires are done over the phone with the customer care team. The firm fields around a thousand enquiries a month, and services a few hundred of those.
“Rather than the traditional system of going in to and meet a lawyer face to face in an initial meeting, we have a client care team who are legally trained but not lawyers who deal with all the enquires that are coming in and that client care team works out what the customer needs.”
McKnight said the sophisticated technology the firm has been able to employ is integral to the firm’s success. As LegalVision is an online firm, employees have the ability to work from home, allowing the firm to work with lawyers who it would otherwise not be able to work with, mainly due to family commitments.
“Most of our lawyers have come from top tier firms and are looking for a more flexible way of working,” he said. “Sometimes they think that the only way to do that is to leave being a lawyer. Part of what we are showing is that there’s an alternative that involves being a lawyer but practicing in a different way.”
