“Digital technology provides an incredible inflection point for society that offers much hope for a better tomorrow.”

Legal Marketing Pages assists clients looking for a licensed legal professional. Legal Marketing Pages has 2 main product offerings. The LegalAdvice.com website allows clients to post a legal question or job to the legal community. The LawyerReviews.com website directs clients to a database to write or read reviews for attorneys.

The Legal Marketing Pages websites allows clients looking for legal assistance to provide detailed information about their case or problem. A conference room allows lawyers to privately share legal documents and discuss details of the case.
LegalAdvice.com is in public beta. The company based in Delaware, was started by Matthew Reischer, who has been a practicing attorney in New York since 2009.

BusinessInterviews.com: Why have you strategically decided not to pursue debt or equity financing at this time?

Matthew: I have always appreciated value investing as a strategy for wealth acquisition. That is, the art of acquiring assets below their intrinsic value. I start off mentioning this fact because it demonstrates my mindset is generally of a long term and conservative nature. I also state this fact as it effectively correlates with my corporate decision in not aggressively pursuing financing for LegalAdvice.com.

As a value investor I have a strong belief that the markets often misprice assets and I do believe that debt as an asset class is presently mispriced. This mispricing of debt may seem to provide the opportunity of low cost money but there are ancillary risks when you utilize leverage to finance growth. As I noted, I am a cautious investor and debt financing often seems alluring until leverage is taken out of the economy and you are not able to outgrow your debt. I suppose one could say I am very pessimistic on the broader global economy and weary of general market risk at this time in America.

Also, many banks will not structure financing without a personal guarantee or encumbering our intellectual property portfolio of which LegalAdvice.com is one such asset. Our company is quite reluctant to go in this direction. That said, a debt-financing arrangement that mitigated these risks is something we would be open to but to date it has been difficult finding a lender willing to work out a deal on such terms.

Equity financing on the other hand is more palatable in some ways because there is no associated risk of defaulting on our ip portfolio as a collateralized asset. However, we have found it quite a challenge to find the right partner to work with. I am of the opinion that a financing arrangement which merely provides liquidity to our organization is a dubious proposition. A considered partner would need to provide “relationship value” in addition to any capital. It is my belief that an equity partner should lead to your next customer in some capacity and that requires a concrete business plan as to how a considered partner could directly add value to the balance sheet. Unfortunately to date we haven’t found any such a partner but we are absolutely open to moving in this direction if we found the right relationship.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you elaborate on the significance of acquiring the legaladvice.com web address and why it was so important to your overall branding and marketing strategy?

Matthew: It is my belief that domain names are a very misunderstood asset class. Domain names have since their introduction been one of the best performing assets of all time. Most people understand domains purely as an identification string upon which people identify a website, but there is whole secondary market that exists for the buying and selling of domains. When one considers that domain names fifteen years ago were a twenty dollar hand registration fee but now exceed in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars one might try to understand what makes a domain name valuable. As someone who sees many parallels between domains as rare, unique and one of a kind — similar to land, real estate, oil, gold, and diamonds, — I immediately knew LegalAdvice.com was a very special asset.

The LegalAdvice.com property was strategically selected from within our ip portfolio for development and monetization because it is what is known as a generic exact match domain and people intuitively trust them like brands. They also receive type-in traffic, they rank more easily in search engine results, and are limited in supply. The ability to immediately impart to your customer base what comprises your product offering and in doing so cut through the clutter of a very fragmented & noisy market environment is a tremendous marketing advantage for a start-up company. Many of our competitors have much larger capital positions than us but we believe we have inherent competitive advantages because of the LegalAdvice.com domain name that will allow us to compete quite adequately in the years to come

BusinessInterviews.com: What are some regulatory issues of operating an online business that you feel are either misunderstood or often overlooked?

Matthew: As someone who attended law school in the 90’s when the Internet was really becoming a transforming event, I have always marveled at the law’s attempts to keep up with technology. I do not think many people fully appreciate how nascent the Internet truly still is as it relates to the philosophical precepts of ‘A Legal System’. Fortunately, the regulatory framework for the dispensing of legal services online has been generally encouraged by most Bar Associations and the legal system as a whole and this has allowed companies like ours to innovate without becoming enmeshed or bogged down in regulatory or compliance frameworks. The ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 recently submitted to the House of Delegates a Resolution and Report on these matters. The report is the product of a three-year study of how globalization and technology are transforming the practice of law and how the regulation of lawyers should be updated in light of these developments. So this is absolutely something we are paying very close attention to.

BusinessInterviews.com: What are some emerging trends that you’re excited about?

Matthew: Digital technology provides an incredible inflection point for society that offers much hope for a better tomorrow. It is quite clear that the direction legal technology is moving in is toward a more natural language oriented experience that is user friendly. When one sees the exponential progression of computing capability that is occurring alongside the ‘Big Data’ phenomena, it is not hard to imagine an end point where super powered computers can do some incredible things as applied to the legal space. While I do not think technology will ever make lawyers obsolete as there are too many variables that are uniquely human to the judicial process, technology is clearly moving in a direction where legal analysis can be assisted and complimented with emerging technologies.

BusinessInterviews.com: Can you expand on how you’re planning on targeting specific keywords to help bring more organic traffic to the LegalAdvice.com website?

Matthew: There is a strong relationship between keywords that a company targets in their paid marketing efforts that can be similarly applied to an organic marketing effort. The key principle of strong, in depth, narrowly focused key word research is the operative principle for driving traffic. In executing our organic marketing strategy over the coming year, it is our goal to integrate our research with our content creation strategy. That is, we will be creating content that is key word rich in the form of infographics, articles, and social media curation. The core of our strategy will not be to let our preconceptions dictate our content but to allow our research to guide our focus to those topics that are relevant to our circulation and readership.