Lawtrades launches app to connect self-employed lawyers with clients

Gig work has transformed transportation, hospitality, and food. Why not law, too?

Lawtrades, a legal gig work platform founded by Raad Ahmed and Ashish Walia, launched its app this month to help connect its 2,000-plus legal professionals with customers (mostly mid-market and enterprise companies). The goal is for corporate attorneys to essentially run their own practices and take back their time.

For Ahmed, the idea for the app was spurred by first-person accounts of the horrors of corporate law culture. Fresh out of law school at the University at Buffalo, he saw how unhappy some of his lawyer friends were working 60-hour workweeks with a firm in hopes of one day making partner. “I was more interested in basically traveling and working remotely and picking and choosing my own clients,” he says over a Zoom call in his New York office. “It dawned on me that there wasn’t really a marketplace platform for delivering legal services, which to me felt like that would be a natural thing.” He decided to forgo practicing law entirely; after raising a friends and family round and with some help from the 500 Global Flagship Accelerator Program, that “natural thing” became a reality.

Lawtrades allows for lawyers and others in the industry to sign up on the platform, list their rates, and select their desired output. They are then matched by Lawtrades with clients–about 100 of which have so far signed up for the platform–who have listed the amount of hours of work needed. Workers then will use the platform to bill their hours. The companies, which Lawtrades says includes Headspace and Crowdstrike, send the funds to the platform, which distributes payments to the freelance workers. Lawtrades takes anywhere between 20% and 25% of earnings, Ahmed says. (In total, workers have earned more than $16 million on the platform.)

Contracting legal work often benefits companies, because they don’t have to pay for additional employee overhead or expensive law firms to have on retainer. That frees up in-house legal departments to work on specific projects, rather than getting bogged down with more mundane tasks like partnership agreements.

The company raised a $6-million Series A funding round last December at an $80-million valuation. That funding allowed the company to build the iOS and Android-compatible app. Lawtrades has also been hiring more aggressively across a range of areas over the past year.

Lawtrades was cash-flow positive before it raised the Series A round and still has at least two years of runway. “We kind of made the decision that we’re going to go for the big swing, especially after COVID-19, that really grows this and that requires making less money, burning more cash to sort of do that,” Ahmed says.

Similar to how some believe the internet is ready for its Web3 revolution, Ahmed believes the gig economy is primed for its next iteration. He says that companies like Fiverr and Upwork, which helped developers connect with clients, were the gig economy’s first iteration. Uber and Airbnb, which brought gig work to real life, were the second, and now areas like law and finance are next thanks to startups like Lawtrades (and rivals UpCounsel and Priori). “There are so many of those folks that used to work there that are now trying to find something else,” Ahmed says. “And they would do their own thing if there was something that enabled them to seamlessly join and practice whatever their sort of profession is.”

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