Seattle legal start-up drawing big interest from Venture Capitalists

After meeting with Mark Britton and Paul Bloom of Avvo last year, I’ve been wondering what this online legal services startup has been up to.

They’re still in stealth mode with their website and services platform not yet on the net. But our Seattle PI’s John Cook reports they’re not stealth in the VC community, just raising a second round of $10 million, led by Ignition Partners, with participation by Silicon Valley powerhouse Benchmark Capital.

Greg Gottesman, a partner at Madrona Venture Group in Seattle, and someone I have a lot of respect for says that Avvo attracted a lot of interest from investors because the startup has assembled a strong team of entrepreneurs and programmers.

Avvo’s target appears to be the consumer and small business legal services market. LexisNexis’ Lawyers.com and Thomson’s Findlaw have remained the heavy weights in the space. However, Avvo could be a force at some point. Britton, a former general counsel and senior vice president at Expedia, serves as AVVO’s CEO and the board now includes Brad Silverberg, a former senior vice president at Microsoft Corp., and Zillow.com Chief Executive Rich Barton, who served as CEO of expedia.

One thing I do see them missing is someone who’s represented real average folks as a lawyer. That’s been an achilles heal for VC backed legal services start-ups in the past. Britton comes from Preston, Gates, & Ellis.

My friend Joe Douress, who now heads all client services at LexisNexis, has done a nice job with lawyers.com over the last year plus. Lawyers.com, more of revenue generator than FindLaw.com, is well positioned in the market. But technology doesn’t cost what it used to and second generation dotcomer’s are pretty smart in creating companies that create revenue, as opposed to just traffic. It will be interesting to see this play out.

Technorati Tags: LexisNexis, FindLaw, Avvo, lawyers.com