Zeb Anderson is on a mission to make legal services available to everyone, not just those who can afford it.
A former compliance and analytics specialist at Medtronic, Anderson is the founder of LegalQ, a free smartphone app that connects people with lawyers.
Through the app, users submit details of their legal situations and why they need an attorney. They then choose a lawyer in their jurisdiction to schedule a free 15-minute consultation or choose to have one instantly, Anderson said. The consultation appointment is automatically synced to the lawyer's calendar.
For $109, a user can pay for a one-hour consultation. If the user wants to obtain that lawyer, that agreement is done off the platform.
Users of the app can search for legal consults in areas such as criminal justice, family law, personal injury, trademark infringement, immigration, employment and labor, taxes, real estate and business. In Minnesota, the platform is processing at least 15 consultation requests each day, Anderson said.
The total addressable market of legal services in the U.S. is around $350 billion, of which 20% is spent on new client outreach and advertising, he said.
Many times, agencies supply lawyers with lists of names of people searching for legal help. Those lawyers use that information to contact people, either through phone calls, e-mails or mailers. That strategy is inefficient, Anderson said.
"It's a terrible user experience for the user, as well as the attorneys who are fighting with 10 other [attorneys] at the same time," Anderson said.
With the app, lawyers can choose how many clients they want referred to them, or choose how many leads they want each month.
Anderson developed the idea for LegalQ while at Medtronic, where he noticed the inefficiencies of middlemen in the medical device industry.
"I started thinking, 'What other industry has that problem?'" Anderson said, "and law is one of them."
To grow LegalQ, Anderson, who earned his law degree at Hamline University in St. Paul, participated in two accelerators in 2021. The first was Beta, a Minneapolis-based organization that focuses on early-stage companies in Minnesota, the other the Techstars Iowa Accelerator, an industry-agnostic program operated from Des Moines, Iowa.
Acceptance into nationally ranked Techstars includes $120,000 in funding. Of that funding, $20,000 is an equity investment from Techstars, with $100,000 an optional convertible note.
While legal services is a crowded market, Kerty Levy, managing director of the Techstars Iowa Accelerator, believes Anderson has found a niche.
"I saw it as a really beautiful play in the legal space," she said. "Zeb is landing a live lead into the calendar of the lawyer, and no one is doing that."
Anderson has raised $400,000 in pre-seed funding from private investors and is raising seed capital later this month.
With an additional $24,500 in grant funding from Launch Minnesota, an initiative of the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, he will further develop the LegalQ platform, hire help and market the app, he said.
Last month, Anderson expanded LegalQ into Illinois and switched on the paid services function for attorneys. He anticipates $500,000 in annual recurring revenue by the end of the year.
Though not trained in software development, Anderson said he was always interested in using technology for conflict resolution. His mission is to help 1 million people get legal help from 50,000 attorneys in 50 states by 2025.
"I just always had a passion for the technology side and think that we can do better," he said. "This is inhibiting access to justice if we don't get good at this. It's 2022. It should be a lot simpler to do this."
