3 Ways The Guidr Online Legal Platform Positively Impacts Law Firms

by Dave Zumpano, with Guy Remond

For the past few years, lawyers have been sitting on the sidelines watching an increase in the number of online self-service legal platforms and hoping that their business won’t be negatively affected.

When Guy Remond (tech entrepreneur, investor and non-executive) and I got together to create and co-found Guidr, we wanted to ensure that law firms in America would benefit from our platform by keeping them at the core and attracting new customers. Guidr does not eliminate the need for a sophisticated hands-on legal service. It provides a digitized service supporting people to access essential legal documents at an affordable price, while helping attract new business to local law firms.

In this article, we’re going to explore the three ways that the Guidr platform supports lawyers and consumers so that nobody loses out:

How we help generate new business for local law firms.
How we support lawyers who aren’t tech savvy.
How Guidr offers consumers better options without law firms losing revenue.

You can hear our full conversation on The Legal Community Podcast.

How we help generate new business for local law firms

Presidential campaigns are won at the local level because local votes all add up; and this is how Guidr works. It’s designed to ripple out from the local lawyer to their network and then the local community.

We are offering law firms access to an advanced platform that they wouldn’t be able to build alone, and we’re helping them to be at the center of it in order to increase revenue.

At Guidr we are creating personal relationships; if somebody needs affordable legal advice but is hesitant to use a faceless multinational online site, they can now access the right information via their local law firm (using our advanced platform).

Guy Remond has designed the Guidr platform so that each associated local law firm is highly visible:

Guy: “We’ve branded the Guidr platform in such a way that your law firm will have its own personalized web address (guidr.legal/yourlawfirmhere), and marketing will be provided for that. If a customer clicks on that part within your website, it will take them to the Guidr platform and all that it offers, but your firm is still represented and acknowledged as the official legal partner. All your company details can be included so customers can see that there is a genuine partnership they can trust.”

How we support lawyers who aren’t tech savvy

I’m 56 years old. I wasn’t brought up with computers. The most exciting thing for me was the invention of the microwave in the 1970s which allowed us to make dinner in 60–90 seconds instead of waiting for an hour.

I’m appreciative of what technology does but I’m not tech savvy. What we have created through Guidr is simple for consumers and lawyers to use; once it’s added to your website your law firm has full access and functionality.

It can be implemented comfortably at your pace, and at the same time will help bring in new business without extra time or effort.

How Guidr offers consumers better options without law firms losing revenue

I have a natural affinity for systemization but many lawyers do not and get caught up in what I call grunt law (working hard and keeping busy).

For the past 25 years we have been very intentional in how we’ve run our law practice.

We used to invite customers to a workshop to teach them the importance of estate planning, then we would have a vision meeting to review the items discussed in the workshop. Each customer would rate how important each of those items was to them.

Based on the client ratings, we would propose three services at three different fees to help them move forward. What we discovered was that 50% of those customers were hiring us for basic documents (wills, health care proxy, power of attorney), and that meant significantly less income for the firm. It kept us busy.

Guidr provides a solution to this repetitive low-value work so that your lawyers and para-professionals can focus on the actual legal work, not the stuff that can easily be delegated to technology.

For example, consider a family in their thirties with young children. They’re rarely worried about dying and don’t prioritize spending on legal planning documents, but if we offered them an online option at 30% of the cost, they will buy (we tested this).

So Guidr is about attracting people who would never ordinarily use your local law firm because of your pricing structure or their input required to do the work, and instead gives them the ability to work to their own schedule at a price they can afford.

The ripple effect

We’re also appealing to the family unit at multiple levels. Imagine the 35-year-old who is accessing the documents online has a 60-year-old parent and an 80-year-old grandparent; Guidr provides the simple documents the 35-year-old needs, and educates them on the other documents their family may require (online or face to face directly from their local law firm).

We help you grow your business up and down; if you happen to see the grandparents in the office first, you advise them to send their millennial grandchildren to the website for easy legal planning.

There is nothing to fear with Guidr: the consumer wins, the lawyer wins and Guidr brings it all together. We’re here to make sure that it all happens smoothly. Guy sums it up perfectly:

Guy: “The world is changing and you’ve got to keep up with the technology and use it as a tool to engage with new people who wouldn’t ordinarily come to you. When a low-budget customer enters the process via Guidr, they are happy because they are getting really good value, you are happy because you are getting business that you wouldn’t ordinarily have had that doesn’t take you any extra time, and during that whole process that customer is potentially recommending you to friends and family for online or in-person services because you are the local law firm. It’s win-win.”

You can explore Guidr’s online legal service here, and get in touch with me or Guy by emailing gremond@guidr.legal and dzumpano@guidr.legal