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Online Legal Matching

By Ed Collar
September 28, 2006

In the relatively newfangled sector of e-commerce, how often does an entrepreneur or attorney who represents e-commerce clients get to witness the birth of a new industry?

Well, there's a new player in the $173 billion legal services industry, and its initials are OLM ' a euphonic moniker for online legal matching.

Actually, online legal matching has been around since 1999, when LegalMatch of San Francisco started matching attorneys to clients based on key factors. But not until recently has automated client acquisition been taken so seriously. Clients immediately embraced this useful electronically enabled innovation but attorneys were reluctant, and were a tad skeptical about replacing their traditional forms of client acquisition with the uncertainties of the Internet. Today, these attorneys have a bit of a different attitude. With the proliferation of the Internet and as Bar associations in state after state issue opinions (overwhelmingly coming to the conclusion that, when done within reasonable guidelines, online legal matching doesn't violate lawyers' ethics on garnering clients), lawyers and law firms from Albuquerque to Yonkers, from Portland, ME, to Portland, OR, are meeting with their accountants and running 'cost-of-client-acquisition' numbers with a new variable inserted ' using intelligent e-commerce as a strategy. And, perhaps more important: Millions of average people looking to hire a lawyer have found this new online avenue, and it's quickly becoming quite fashionable.

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