alt.legal: Going Viral In Legal — Everyday She’s Hustling

The legal world is going digital, robots are reviewing your contracts and evidence, and legal startups are attempting to gobble up market share from traditional legal players. Competition is fierce, so how can traditional firms leverage the tools of the digital age to distinguish themselves and bring in new business?

Enter Eva Hibnick, a Harvard Law-educated, ex-Cravath associate, who fell in love with the modern art of client acquisition, and built an alternative legal business around it called ONE400. At its core, the business’ mission is to leverage the best of the twenty-first century to create “legal innovation” and, ultimately, to get your firm new business.

I met Eva at a Harvard Law alumni event she organized (a “Legal Tech Pitch Night”).  I covered the story of the event for ATL, and I absolutely loved it.  [Sidebar for Penn Law alumnus:  because it’s not plagiarism if you properly cite the reference, let me hereby disclose you that I BORROWED this idea from Eva and am helping organize a Penn Law Legal Startup Pitch Night on Dec. 9^th, hope to see you there!]

Eva has a quintessential alt.legal mindset, telling me “I am not defined by my law degree and neither are you. Those I went to law school with and worked with are the smartest bunch of people I know. I think they forget that they can learn and excel in any industry.” We violently agreed that Biglaw associates (or any talented lawyer) can transition into any field they wish, as long as they are willing to put themselves in uncomfortable situations (again). Only through discomfort can they leverage the real thing they learned in law school – how to learn a lot of new (very boring) information quickly.

She briefed me on the numbers that made this segment of the legal industry so appealing to her and ONE400, explaining that “the legal industry is valued at $400 billion, $274 billion of which is the revenue attained by law firms. The one thing that all law firms care about is acquiring more clients because really who can ever have enough of those?!” Moreover, she explain that “law firms spend on average 3.4% of their revenue on marketing, which means that the legal marketing industry is estimated to be worth $9.3 billion.”  I’m convinced.

Enjoy Eva’s legal entrepreneurship story, and how she built ONE400, below in the Q&A:

Joe Borstein:  What is ONE400?

Eva Hibnick:  ONE400 helps law firms with client acquisition. I was inspired to start ONE400 after working for a later stage startup for two years. I became obsessed with the out of the box approaches startups use to acquire clients, also known as “growth hacking.” Later, I realized that law firms weren’t utilizing these techniques.  I teamed up with a former Legalzoom executive, Allen Rodriguez, who had built out their legal plan and several legal services products — ONE400 was formed!

Our core goal is to distinguish your firm’s brand from your competitors’ by using creative approaches to market your firm. We are the antithesis of a law firm; we are cutting edge, data-driven and definitely don’t follow precedent. That’s the way we like it.

Joe Borstein:  Sounds interesting, but is it catching on?  How big is the business?

Eva Hibnick:  In December 2013, we started with 2 clients and 0 employees. Almost 2 years later, we are a team of 10, and cater to over 50 clients located all over the world (including Nigeria!). Several of our clients are Biglaw and class action firms. We have raised no money and in almost 2 years have become a million dollar business.

Joe Borstein:  So let’s get in the weeds a bit. How does ONE400 actually distinguish client firms from the endless sea of carbon-copy partnerships?

Eva Hibnick:  One way is what we call “legal product development,” and we are the only agency that has this specialty.

Specifically, we study the services your firm offers, map out a process to re-configure them into flat fee products (either one time or subscription-based), build out the product — if it requires software — and then market it. Recently, we helped an employment law firm launch a subscription based product combining HR consulting with legal advice and documents. The product was marketed to small businesses who didn’t have a fully-developed HR department. This created cost certainty for their clients and a lovely recurring revenue stream for the firm.

Product development has also permeated Biglaw. For example Cooley, offers a free term sheet generator — perfect for lead generation. Another firm that has a wealth of products that they offer to clients is Littler Mendelson.

Joe Borstein: Why should lawyers care about “legal innovation,” or even marketing for that matter?

Eva Hibnick:  As you climb the ranks in Biglaw or go to a boutique, you will be expected to start bringing in a book of business. Currently, most firms stick to traditional marketing and have no data backing up their ROI.

I always tell firms “why not use the digital world to acquire even more clients? Keep doing what you are doing, but let us experiment with other channels.” We track the work we do and show them the return on their investment from digital marketing.

Joe Borstein:  Do you have career advice for all the disenfranchised lawyers out there that want to start their own companies (possibly even servicing legal)?

Eva Hibnick:  My biggest advice is to position your life in a way where opportunities come to you. I always surround myself with entrepreneurs and I’ll reach out to almost anyone I find interesting via Linkedin. Most people are quite responsive and happy to meet to exchange ideas.

Also, I highly recommend working for another entrepreneur before betting big on yourself.  Yes you will take a huge pay cut, but in the end it will be worth it and you will make mistakes on someone else’s dime instead of your own. There are just so many things you end up realizing you know nothing about.

Joe Borstein:  Great advice.  Any final thoughts?

Eva Hibnick:  If you don’t like feeling uncomfortable and enjoy using the words “Please find attached,” you probably want to stay in Biglaw. As an entrepreneur, everyday there is a problem thrown at you that you have never encountered before, and this will never change. There is no precedent. You have to just act on your best assumption and iterate until you get it right.

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Joe Borstein is a Global Director at Thomson Reuters’ award-winning legal outsourcing company, Pangea3, which employs over 1,000 full-time attorneys across the globe. He and his co-author Ed Sohn each spent over half a decade as associates in Biglaw and were classmates at Penn Law.

Joe manages a global team dedicated to counseling law firm and corporate clients on how to best leverage Pangea3’s full-time attorneys to improve legal results, cut costs, raise profits, and have a social life. He is a frequent speaker on global trends in the legal industry and, specifically, how law firms are leveraging those trends to become more profitable. If you are interested in entrepreneurship and the delivery of legal services, please reach out to Joe directly at [email protected].