It's one thing to rile Britain's stodgy bewigged barristers. But the Cohen brothers have done one better. The founders of the DesktopLawyer site recently drew the wrath of the pope, who called their online legal service ethically "repellent."
What vile sin do Richard and Grahame Cohen commit on a daily basis? They peddle low-cost divorces online, a very successful service that has helped make DesktopLawyer the leading Web legal company in the U.K. Now the dot-com is heading to the U.S., following its mid-April merger with a top American player, MyLawyer.com.
The merged company will face a few legal hurdles of its own. DesktopLawyer's online services, which eliminate the need for a lawyer in certain cases, could run afoul of U.S. laws that protect consumers from unauthorized practitioners. Online companies also face resistance from establishment lawyers, who complain that the upstarts compromise ethical standards and undermine the profession by positioning traditional lawyers as overpriced and expendable.
"I would be shocked that you could develop software that could encompass the nuances, subtleties and complexity of the law today," says Lawrence Fox, a partner at Philadelphia firm Drinker Biddle. His recent involvement in an American Bar Association (dossier) online training program for new lawyers reinforced his skepticism that technology can replace a lawyer, even for routine matters. "The concept of a 'simple' will, employment agreement or divorce harkens back to a simpler era when the law was less complex and when people didn't stand to lose as much as a consequence of bad advice," says Fox.
Bad advice or not, the Cohens are proving that people will gladly avoid hiring a lawyer if they can. After offering an uncontested divorce service for only 10 weeks, DesktopLawyer captured 6 percent of the $120 million divorce market in the U.K. A big part of the appeal is the $95 price. By taking the lawyer out of the equation, DesktopLawyer has been able to radically undercut the rates of independent practitioners and small firms by about 80 percent.
But the Cohens' bustling divorce business owes much of its success to the London tabloids. After DesktopLawyer partner Freeserve (FREE), a U.K. Internet service provider, ran a newspaper campaign offering a free DesktopLawyer divorce to new members, the Sun, Daily Mail and Express jumped on the story. The dot-com was hyped alongside the split of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. And DesktopLawyer's Feb. 14 $48 prenuptial contract offer was played up alongside a story about Michael Douglas popping the question to British actress Catherine Zeta-Jones. That's pretty good publicity for a dot-com with virtually no marketing budget.
Richard Cohen, a lawyer, and his younger brother Grahame, a programmer, say they didn't foresee the hype and controversy. They launched DesktopLawyer a year ago as a subsidiary of Epoch Software, of which Grahame is CEO. The initial plan was to market their Rapidocs software to law firms. The software lets people customize their divorce papers and other legal documents online without a lawyer's help. To promote the software, they launched their site, DesktopLawyer.co.uk, to show a skeptical U.K. legal community that demand existed for online counsel services.
"We've leveraged the intellectual property of a lawyer and turned it into a commodity," says Richard Cohen.
It's no surprise that the software hasn't been a hit among lawyers. The bulk of DesktopLawyer's business has come from the sale of more than 60,000 legal documents, with wills and uncontested divorce the bestsellers. The site's free law guide helps people select the legal document they need before they customize it - something a lawyer or paralegal would normally do - using the software. To finalize a divorce, people still need to file with the courts and pay a $240 court fee, but DesktopLawyer saves time and money: U.K. solicitors charge about $800 to draft a comparable document.
DesktopLawyer does provide offline legal support. Clients who spend more than an hour online and seem in need of help are referred to a network of 50 solicitors. However, less than 5 percent of users opt to purchase offline advice.
