Using Findlaw as Your Small Business Advisor
Free High-Tech Tools from FindLaw.com by Carole Levitt, J.D., M.L.S. This article originally appeared in the Research Advisor, Issue 19, June 2000. Reprinted with permission. |
Have you found FindLaw.com? I discovered it in the fall of 1999 while researching web sites for a book on Internet legal research I was writing. If you think I am going to start proselytizing, you're right. I admit it; I'm a FindLaw groupie, and maybe even a junkie. When I log onto the Internet, my connection opens directly to FindLaw—not my website! Now, that's FindLaw fervor.
My enthusiasm for FindLaw is more than just a law librarians' zeal for the ability to access 60,000 law and government web sites with the click of a mouse or to launch a law-only search engine (LawCrawler). I am also an attorney ,and it is FindLaw's Small Business Center and virtual office, with its wide choice of law practice management services, nearly all free, that really got me going.
FindLaw is the largest, free, legal portal in the Universe, or at least in Internet space-my universe, the. The “who” behind FindLaw are the visionary co-founders, attorney Stacy Stern, and her attorney/engineer husband, Tim Stanley. It all began with Tim's one page list of legal web sites, compiled in 1996 for a presentation he made to the Northern California Association of Law Libraries.
When I first spoke to Stacy Stern, the three-year old FindLaw had a staff of ten (mostly attorneys) and was housed in temporary office space (the apartment that she and Tim lived in, or attempted to live in, and the one next to it and the one next to that). You get the picture. They had just received an infusion of $10 million in venture capital financing. Obviously, someone else besides me had found FindLaw--@Ventures, the funding arm of CMGI, Inc. You may have heard of two of CMGI's companies that comprise its modest network of sixty companies, the search engines AltaVista and Lycos.
Three months later, I made my pilgrimage to the FindLaw shrine. But, instead of a shrine, what I found was raw space (not to mention raw energy). FindLaw was in the midst of a build-out to accommodate a staff that had now grown to 35 (today, six months later, the staff is at 75 and growing daily).
What are all these people doing at FindLaw? They are there to help you establish your new law practice or to grow your existing practice, and it's all free. All you need is an Internet connection and the ability to type “” into the address box on your browser.
Using FindLaw As Your Small Business Advisor
For those of you opening a law practice for the first time, and requiring some business start-up advice, FindLaw's Small Business Center can serve as your in-house corporate counsel, gratis of course. Advising you on how to set up your firm is the author of the “Legal Small Business Book”, who explains why a LLC is the way to go. Then, the author of “The Soho Guidebook” provides you with thousands of pages of information on how to start, finance and manage your business.
Finally, for the coup de grace, click on “Business Tools” in the FindLaw Small Business Center for downloadable business plan examples and forms that you can fill in today to begin your law practice. The forms cover everything from recruiting and hiring employees to a balance sheet template. You can also get free business tips by subscribing to FindLaw's Small Business E-mail newsletter and joining their Small Business Discussion List.
