UpCounsel has been called a cross between eHarmony and Uber.
Its co-founder and CEO, Matt Faustman J.D. ’09, MBA ’09, is a kind of matchmaker for lawyers and clients. He’s also one of the 150 “Next Wave Top Professionals 35 & Under,” as selected last fall by the career-oriented social networking site LinkedIn.
UpCounsel makes matches between vetted independent lawyers and businesses pining for quality, affordable legal services. The lawyers who register with the site (more than 10,000 so far) are like Uber drivers in that they bid on individual jobs. Cutting out law-firm overhead and the profit margins needed to put money in partners’ pockets results in businesses paying about two-thirds of what they would with a traditional law firm, the company says.
If UpCounsel proves disruptive to the legal services industry, that will be nothing new for Faustman. In law school he founded a company to help make student notes more widely accessible and reduce reliance on expensive hardbound textbooks.