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"The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.\nName: LawPivot\nQuick Pitch: LawPivot connects startups that need legal advice with lawyers who can answer their questions.\nGenius Idea: Founding a company requires so much legal legwork that some law schools offer a special degree in entrepreneurship. But most startups are understandably reluctant to cough up $300 to $600 per hour for legal advice, and they generally don't have time (or personal assistants) to track down the appropriate lawyer for a consultation.\nLawPivot's founders, both lawyers, weren't the first to notice this problem for startups, but they may have been first to see how a complementary problem on the lawyer's side could help solve it. \n\"The legal industry is fundamentally changing right now, where it's about how good of a lawyer you are, but also how big of a book of business that you have,\" says co-founder Nitin Gupta. \"Lawyers were just not taught how to develop business. All the traditional ways of developing business, which are speaking events, conferences, and writing articles, are just very inefficient.\"\nGupta's team has set out to offer the exposure and the public reputation that lawyers need in order to develop their businesses by asking them to answer startups' legal questions free of charge.\nHere's how it works: Startups submit a question, tag it with relevant topics and confidentially submit it to LawPivot. LawPivot's algorithm selects the 10 lawyers from its database to answer that specific question based on how it is tagged and the company that submitted it. The startup can then select as many lawyers from that list as it feels comfortable sending its question to. Those lawyers, and nobody else, will see the contents of the question and have an opportunity to respond with advice.\n\n\n\n\nOnline legal advice has an obvious potential for disaster, but LawPivot has done its best to keep the operation legitimate. Guptas co-founder, Jay Mandal, is the former lead mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Apple. Together the team personally vets every lawyer that applies to answer questions on the site (so far they've approved more than 200 of them). A seed investment from Google Ventures also makes a strong statement in favor of the site's credibility.\nLawPivot is not intended to challenge law firms. Fair questions are more in line with, \"What are the usual terms that one gives to a newly hired executive?\" than, \"Can you draft this contract?\" Rather, it is intended to help law firms establish relationships and reputation. Recipients of advice can write testimonials for the lawyers who offered it, and lawyers move up a public ranking system as they provide valuable advice. Meanwhile, startups and other verticals LawPivot plans to target in the future get an easy starting point for legal questions.\nThe service is free, but eventually LawPivot will charge both lawyers and startups to use it. If the company can pull this business model off, it will have devised a way to not only intercept fees lawyers sometimes collect for consultations but also collect fees from those lawyers themselves. If that doesn't scream brilliant, we don't know what it does.\nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, photogl\nSeries Supported by Microsoft BizSpark\n\n\n\n\nThe Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/03/08/lawpivot/>