The idea for Legal GPS came around the time I (Chris Daming) had started a law firm to focus on helping entrepreneurs. I worked in a coworking space (easier to get clients if your office is 10 feet away). And at least once a day, a business owner would stop by my office with a “quick legal question.”
Initially, I’d try the “here are a couple things you should do, but you should really hire a lawyer because you might be missing something” pitch. But after a few months, something didn’t feel right. It didn’t make sense to tell someone, “You should hire me and pay $500” and then send them an email telling them that to complete the work, I just needed their full legal name and address.
So we started exploring solutions to fix that problem and found an even bigger one -- that about 75% of businesses weren’t hiring attorneys at all. And it makes sense. Most new businesses aren’t hiring CPAs, business consultants, or other experts -- they do it on their own either because they don’t know how those experts can help or they can’t afford it! So why would attorneys be the hiring outlier?
And with attorneys, when you “don’t know what you don’t know,” you can’t prevent a legal problem you never knew to search for.
We knew we couldn’t just provide information. And we couldn’t just put a free attorney in everyone’s office.
We had to create a simple platform that ensures the entrepreneur can know the law and want to act on it. So many initial legal tasks were simple -- as long as the entrepreneur knew what to do, why to do it, and how to do it. With that power, entrepreneurs could get the same level of legal guidance as those hiring attorneys. And more.
Now they’d also know the “why” behind why legal matters. They’d know how to do it. And as a result, they’d do better in business by knowing the “rules” that control every transaction. Here’s how it all happened: