We here at Off The Record were saddened to hear the news of the impending closure of UpCounsel. UpCounsel is an online marketplace that connects freelance lawyers with small businesses and other prospective clients. They bill themselves as the "first legal platform that helps fast-growing companies build their own custom legal teams . . . . ”
Who was UpCounsel?
Founded by a former Silicon Valley attorney Matt Faustman and engineer Mason Blake in 2012, UpCounsel raised money from well-known and highly-respected investors such as early Uber backer, Menlo Ventures. UpCounsel was a darling of second wave legal tech who raised venture capital in the cratered post-recession legal market and dared to pursue a vision that technology could and even should play a central role in the reimagining of legal services for the 21st century. They were visionaries.
While we never met the UpCounsel team and our companies operated in entirely different spheres of the legal ecosystem, we admired UpCounsel from afar. Ultimately raising $26M in venture money UpCounsel built a great business and "their lawyers . . . completed work on behalf of tens of thousands of companies, including some of the best startups and the Fortune 500.” They also challenged regulators and clashed with traditional law firm competitors over the archaic rules of lawyer professional conduct. They were rockstars.
The regulatory burden of innovation
The recent news of UpCounsel reminded us of how lucky we are to, like UpCounsel, build a marketplace for legal services. We started three years after UpCounsel, in 2015. And while we’ve never had as many employees nor raised close to as much money as UpCounsel we’re coming off of a record year in 2019 and a record month in January 2020. We have a small but growing team in Seattle that’s committed to helping drivers connect with local qualified lawyers to fight their tickets and keep their driving records clean. We’re in constant contact with regulators throughout the country and we’re benefitting from the tailwind of enlightened bar associations in Utah and California (to name just two) who have actively solicited our input as they reconsider the rules of professional conduct to spur innovation, allow competition and, hopefully, improve consumer access to legal services (changes that the founders of UpCounsel likely never thought possible in 2012).
Is traditional venture a good fit for legal tech?
The UpCounsel news also caused us to ask to what extent traditional venture capital is a fit for legal technology innovation. Painting with a painfully broad brush, most VC investments are designed to push companies to sprint, raising lots of money and seeking scale at any cost. But not every company is positioned to find that kind of growth and not every sector can support it - often for reasons completely outside of the control of the founder, as appears to be the case with UpCounsel. We don’t know whether that’s true for us or for UpCounsel or for legal all-up, but we feel incredibly lucky to have found Bryce Roberts and Indie.vc, whose “permissionless entrepreneurship” allows us to grow and scale quickly while still building a sustainable business. Let’s be clear, Off The Record is no lifestyle company. We want to build something meaningful and profitable today so that we can thrive and continue the dream tomorrow.
Ultimately we at Off The Record are significant beneficiaries of UpCounsel and the trail they blazed. As part of a group of companies that helped get legitimate knowledgeable investors interested in legal and later as a vanguard who pushed boundaries at the intersection law and technology, Off The Record would be dramatically different today if not for UpCounsel.
R.I.P.
Off the Record 