This month I teamed up with Chad Burton and Betsy Westhafer to co-found Curo Legal, a business that focuses on law practice operations. [Side note: Yes, I am still developing my legal games and reforming legal education among other things.]
For several years, I’ve provided solos and small firms with advice on how to set up virtual law offices, unbundle, or add some form of online or alternative legal service delivery to their traditional law firm models. Chad was in the same boat being called out by other lawyers to provide guidance in setting up their own virtual law firms. So we teamed up. Here’s part of our mission statement:
We want to see lawyers empowered to provide clients with the full value of their expertise without being weighed down by the stress of keeping up with administrative, technology, and other aspects of running a successful law practice. The founders of Curo Legal realize that by freeing lawyers to focus on lawyering and by making legal service delivery more efficient, we increase access to legal services for the public by lowering legal fees and providing lawyers and clients with alternative and complementary methods of working together.
Chad and I spent over a year brainstorming ways that we could create a centralized hub to outsource most of the administrative, technology, and marketing needs that a law firm might have. We wanted the people who came to us with questions to have a place they could go online, receive an assessment of their needs, communicate with us efficiently, and then be matched up with companies that provide the services needed to grow and manage their law practices. Because of our own experiences with both traditional and virtual law firms, Curo Legal was designed to help lawyers upgrade their law practices through the use of technology to scale appropriately to compete in the changed online legal marketplace.
We are excited that other companies want to partner with us as part of this central hub of services. Clio announced their partnership with us today on their blog. We are working on other strategic relationships with other companies (both technology vendors and other providers in the legal community) and practice management experts that will expand the reach of the outsourcing and services we can provide to the legal profession.
We are still building out the “branches” of this hub and hope to incorporate additional educational resources through the website. The idea is to provide “holistic” outsourcing of services in an unbundled format online. Eventually, we would like to see the lawyers that come to us for solutions also be able to look to Curo Legal for guidance on other critical issues in practice management, such as time management, mindfulness, and other practical business and entrepreneurial skills.
As with any startup venture, this is a labor of love and a work in progress as we build it out. Any feedback is always appreciated.
Excited to learn more about this start-up! Congratulations!