We created the first legal brand that 70 percent of adult Americans recognize and helped millions of Americans protect their small businesses and families. Our strategy was to leverage a platform of people and technology to create affordable, convenient, consistently high-quality legal solutions for the most common legal needs of small-business owners and individuals. Access to the law is a fundamental right. You cannot have a healthy democracy if the legal system protects only large corporations and the wealthy. Many feel economically frozen out of the legal system due to attorney fees spiraling out of reach of the average American. LegalZoom’s mission is to democratize law. In the early years, the regulatory landscape was like a dark, stormy cloud always hanging over us-you just hoped that we would get to shelter before it opened up.

They’re two very different worlds, and I’d be remiss not to highlight the distinction. I should clarify that LegalZoom is focused on “small” law-helping everyday Americans and small businesses with their routine legal needs-in contrast to “big” law, the province of large law firms, corporations, and the uber wealthy. LegalZoom just happened to apply that strategic mindset to the law. John Suh: Internet entrepreneurs spend a lot of time thinking about new solutions to old problems. I wonder, as you thought about building this business, how you thought about creating something new in the legal space. It was clear from the outset that LegalZoom was trying to create a new kind of legal organization, but it was not so clear how it was going to be received by regulators or by the public. Wilkins: Thank you, John, for speaking with us. Wilkins, faculty director of the Center on the Legal Profession, recently sat down with John Suh, CEO of LegalZoom from 2007 to 2019, for a conversation on the relationship between regulation and innovation in the legal profession.ĭavid B.

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