Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Blawg Mission Statement / getting a handle on court filing

My business partner and I started Lawdex back in an old adobe carriage house in Tucson, Arizona back in 1999. At the time it looked like court eFiling was around the corner.

It wasn't.

So we put our website on auto-respond. It wasn't until 2004 that things changed enough for us to start putting real energy back into the operation. We honed our business plan, brought in angel investors, developed our IP stack, filed with the US Patent Office, and eventually went live with electronic court filing in California. Later, we moved our primary garage to San Francisco. Our site now delivers legal documents over the web coast to coast. Not everyone would agree this is a good thing, but in the process we've essentially made it possible to initiate a lawsuit over a desktop computer or a crackberry.

Over this period I've gained a weird kind of expertise with the electronic exchange of legal documents. But no matter what the size of our firm (and for now it’s still pretty small), I’ll continue to think of myself as a garage CEO. Also, I continue to meet an array of Lawyers, Geeks, and Angels. I'd like this blawg to serve two purposes: 1) to answer how-to questions about online legal services like electronic filing (not legal advice, I’m not a lawyer) and 2) I’d like it to function as an ongoing chronicle of life in a West Coast start-up.