Finding the imbalance between supply and demand

A conversation with EJ Lawless for the HR Tech GTM podcast

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EJ: I don't typically think of lawyers as entrepreneurial. I assume that people who

want post-graduate education who are entrepreneurial get an MBA. How did you

go about validating your idea as you were thinking about this and seeing the

demand for people to start their own practices?

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Raad: When I was graduating law school, I was entering one of the worst legal

job markets in history. I realized I might not get hired by anybody. It was affecting

hundreds of thousands, if not millions of lawyers all around the world.

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What do we do about that? I looked at the law firms that were laying people off,

and others that were simply not hiring. The demand for legal work was still increasing.

People needed lawyers, companies needed lawyers. The demand was there. There

was just this imbalance of supply and demand from a high overview, macro perspective.

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What if we got a bunch of these lawyers that are willing to offer up their services

connected to people or companies that are actually looking to hire them. What if

we built out different tools to make them more efficient instead of everything

happening offline, which was my experience working at different law firms and

public interest organizations.

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It was very routine, very manual. There was no dashboard. It was all phone calls

and sometimes faxes. I thought it would be a fun idea to bring a lot of that information

online and do something useful with it. Why is it only creatives that can be independent,

like designers or writers. Why not white collar professionals?

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What we're working on is specifically the legal vertical. But, I see this trend of people

building out these hyper-vertical labor marketplaces across anything from management

consulting to finance. They're disrupting the McKinsey, and the Ernst & Young models.

We’re disrupting the BigLaw model.

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