There was a time, a few dark years ago, when there were only a few legal startups. Fastcase would give you free cases if you used an iPad and Clio/RocketMatter/MyCase were trying to upset the law practice management software field. (Spoiler alert: they did.)
Now? I’m learning about ten more services per day. Not all of them are law-related, but they are all useful for lawyers. RightSignature/DocuSign/AdobeWhatever are all useful for getting e-signatures so that your client doesn’t have to trek through LA traffic to get to you to sign one or two pieces of paper. Dropbox/Box/GoogleDrive/OneDrive are useful for obvious cloud storage reasons. You can pair together twelve mini-apps to tackle your accounting: invoicing, billing, collections, receipt tracking, expense tracking, actual accounting, etc. Google Forms and its competitors can be used to create intake and other forms, then connected with something like Clio to automate much of your document generation.
Things like Zapier, IFTTT, and Workato connect all of these apps together. So, if a client submits info into Google Forms, it’ll be carried by Zapier to Clio, which sends it through its own (white-labeled, I believe) document generation process to create intake sheets, form letters, etc.
But even for me, a lifelong tech geek, it can get a little overwhelming. And forget paying $10/month to six dozen mini startups that may disappear overnight.
It’s time for a little consolidation, my dear legal industry. Because if I can’t handle twenty-seven services, you can be damn sure that older senior partner in small firm that actually has money to spend doesn’t want to juggle that many different companies. Not to mention the headache of setting up Zaps or IFTTT recipes to connect everything. And imagine how much a product would be worth that had all of these little startups’ features, already connected, in set-it-and-forget-it fashion?
