Access to a lawyer can be a daunting and, in many cases, prohibitively expensive experience, particularly for individuals and small businesses. One of the reasons for its exclusivity is that there are only 1.3 million lawyers in the US, according to American Bar Association, for more than 260 million adults and 33 million small businesses.
Charley Moore has spent the last 20 years working to change that dynamic. He is the founder and CEO of the San Francisco, California-based RocketLawyer, an online legal service platform that uses both AI and access to legal professionals to provide individuals, families, and business owners affordable and accessible legal services. This founder’s journey is based on my interview with Moore.
Moore began thinking about the idea while practicing law in Silicon Valley during the early days of the internet. “I went to the Naval Academy and served in Desert Storm then decided to become a lawyer and went to law school at Berkeley. The internet happened and I ended up representing Yahoo from three employees up to their IPO,” says Moore.
The rise of the internet gave him the idea of connecting people to lawyers as it was the first time that legal professionals would be looking at the same screens as their clients. He would then spend the next ten years working on the idea of what would become RocketLawyer with its founding in 2008. “I felt that it would be a decade’s long project and initiative, and it turned out that way. And a saying attributed to Bill Gates became a mantra for me. He said, ‘People tend to overestimate what they can do in a year but underestimate what they can do in 10.’ So I always try to have this decade by decade view,” says Moore.
RocketLawyer helped usher in the growth in online legal services. The global legal services industry will generate nearly $839 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach more than $1.112 trillion by 2026, according to Statista. The online legal services segment of the market is expected to grow the fastest with key players in addition to RocketLawyer including LegalMatch, Lawpath Operations, LawAdvisor, UpCounsel, LawTarazoo, LawTrades, IncFile, LegalZoom, Avvo, LegalNature and others. However, where RocketLawyer differs from other services, according to Moore, is in its marriage of actual lawyers with AI assisted software, providing the capability to be both local and global.
Moore’s decade by decade approach to building the business seems to be working. As the company celebrates its 15th year anniversary, the firm services some 30 million customers, or one in nine Americans, operating everywhere in the US with over 100 million legal documents created using the RocketLawyer platform. “We also operate uniquely for a legal platform, because law is local, and it’s based on language, so the underlying software platform was built so that we could do this on a global basis,” says Moore. The company also now operates in Europe in multiple European languages.
“Recently, within the last couple of years, we launched RocketLawyer Latin America, which is based in Brazil. And so, you can use RocketLawyer now in Portuguese, in Spanish, in Dutch in French, to create legal documents and get help with pretty much any legal situation, according to the local laws, and in then those local languages,” says Moore. In addition, the company’s services are now offered as an employee benefit at companies like Google, Salesforce, Boston Consulting Group and Hitachi to name a few.
To fuel its growth, Rocket Lawyer has raised a total of $291.7 million in funding over 7 rounds, most of which comes in the form of a $223 million debt financing placement in April of 2021 led by Vista Credit Partners. Equity investors in its A through D rounds include August Capital, Investor Growth Capital Limited, LexisNexis, Google Ventures, August Capital, Industry Ventures, Lefebvre Sarrut and Morgan Stanley.
Moore’s journey to becoming a lawyer and an entrepreneur starts in St. Louis, Missouri where his father, who never had an education pass eighth grade, owned a gas station. His mother was a schoolteacher.
“I was raised by an entrepreneur. I grew up working in a family business as a kid, working at my dad’s gas station,” says Moore. His dad had been a truck driver who had learned how to drive fuel trucks in the Air Force. He became a long-distance trucker and then saved up his money to open his first gas station. Moore was witness to the hard work, persistence and long-term planning needed to run a business through the vagaries of retail gas. “My mom had been a teacher and so she was sort of a light in terms of formal education,” says Moore which would propel him to the Navel Academy and Berkley law school prior to founding RocketLawyer in 2008.
As for the future? “I’m really excited about the next decade in terms of folks being able to access low-cost legal services. What we’re doing is bringing the cost down so that ordinary people and small businesses can afford the kind of legal services that before was the domain of rich folks and well-funded business,” concludes Moore.
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