myLawCoach
Sometime in the summer of 2006, I got a mysterious message from one Ken Moscaret. He said, “Hey Mark, my name is Ken Moscaret. I am a lawyer, fee expert, and I am pretty sure I know what you guys are up to. I suspect it is a Zillow-like model for lawyers, where you bring a lot of information together regarding lawyers. I think it is a great idea and I would like to chat with you about some of my own.”
While I may not recall the message exactly, I do recall that it made me smile because (a) we were still in stealth mode, and (b) this guy certainly knew what he was talking about. So, I looked him up on the Internet and found this blurb:
Ken Moscaret, Esq., is a leading expert witness on attorney’s fees and litigation management, whose clients include big corporations, public entities, and Top 250 U.S. law firms. Mr. Moscaret testified as an expert witness in federal court in 2008 regarding $700 million in attorney’s fees in the Enron securities class action litigation in Houston.
Impressive. I decided to give him a call.
After becoming painfully acquainted with each other’s voicemail, Ken and I finally shared a long phone call where Ken offered a number of interesting ideas regarding new business models in the legal industry and where we might take Avvo. We continued to keep in touch over the next year and a half, with Ken consistently offering interesting ideas about opportunities in the legal marketplace.
Well, one of those ideas is now reality in form of a new blog penned by Ken called myLawCoach. Flatteringly, Ken talks about myLawCoach as a consumer-centric, informational resource that picks up where Avvo leaves off. In other words, once you have researched your issue and selected your lawyer, myLawCoach helps you manage your relationship with the lawyer. The site is set up as a number of question and answer, plain-English tutorials. Topics include things like attorney billing rules, costs of different phases of a case and explanations of different parts of the legal process.
Now, I tip my hat to any site with a sincere mission of helping consumers better understand the legal industry. However, Ken’s idea of holding their hand through the litigation process is truly unique. Yes, it will take Ken some time to build up enough guides to cover a broad swath of the almost-infinite number of issues that can arise in litigation, but he is off to a great start. Currently, many of the guides are cost focused but, hey, that’s the guy’s greatest area of expertise, and geez I found cost issues to be perplexing even as a General Counsel.
So, Ken, kudos to you and myLawCoach. Congratulations on launching this novel site, and I wish you luck on continuing to build it out.
p.s. Once you have read every one of Ken’s myLawCoach posts, check out his eloquent prose in this article published in the Daily Journal this week. While I would have written this post even without this article, it only reinforces for me how much Ken and I see eye to eye.