Roland Vogl, director of the SLS Program in Law, Science, and Technology comments on the useful nature of a website designed to connect clients to flat-rate legal services. 

Clients are demanding fixed-fee services and balking at the hourly rates charged by large law firms. For Big Law, it's a problem. But a trio of entrepreneurs saw opportunity.

On Thursday, they debuted LawGives, an online platform connecting businesses with flat-rate legal services, at a Harvard Law School conference on legal services innovations. The Palo Alto-based company, backed by Stanford University's StartX accelerator program, offers basic legal services for businesses and startups in prepriced packages. The packaged services, which can include counsel on website terms of use, nondisclosure agreements, patent filings, acquisitions, and preferred series A financing, are priced from $799 to $4,999.

…

Big law firms may be more reluctant to embrace the platform, said Roland Vogl, executive director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology and cofounder of the Center for Legal Informatics (CodeX). Still, he added, “lots of partners at firms are fairly autonomous in the things they do.”

“If there's a platform that brings you clients, and you don't have to do much, other than sign up, that's a strong reason for folks to give it a try,” he said.