Could you found a law firm at a Startup Weekend?

On Sunday evening I had the good fortune of addressing a tremendous group of developers, designers, lawyers, law students and entrepreneurs at Seattle Legal Tech Startup Weekend.

Founded in 2007, a Startup Weekend is a 54-hour weekend event during which groups of developers, business managers, startup enthusiasts, marketing gurus, graphic artists and more pitch ideas for new startup companies, form teams around those ideas, and work to develop a working prototype, demo, or presentation by Sunday evening. Team members have never met before Friday evening.

In addition to the ‘Weekend Warriors’, Startup Weekends attract speakers, coaches, panelists (generally well-respected members of the local startup community or notable names in the tech industry), and various sponsors and company representatives.

As of last year, 1068 events had been held, involving over 100,000 entrepreneurs across more than 400 cities in over 100 countries and over 8190 startups have been created. The Kauffman Foundation, Google and Microsoft are sponsors.

Seattle’s Legal Tech Startup Weekend had all of this and more. Winners, from among a dozen teams, included:

• Law students with a designer and developers created Casebooker (@casebooker), a peer to peer platform that allows students to purchase casebooks from law students within their school. “Save money, lose the hassle,” is their cry.
• Legaldrink.co (@legaldrink) created a web based app that provides travelers a resource for local drinking laws — think “Can I drink in the park in Seattle?” They even generated $34 in sales over the weekend.
• A Seattle practicing lawyer and his team at Crisis Capture (@criscapture) created Restaurant Crisis, a web-based crisis management application for the food service industry that actively leads an onsite manager through real-time accident management.

With so many underemployed lawyers today and seeing all the energy and talent among these weekend warriors and coaches I couldn’t help but think of a Start Weekend for founding a law firm.

Form teams of law students, lawyers, marketing and business development professionals, business leaders, firm administrators, technologists, entrepreneurs and financial folks.

Give them 54 hours to strategize on a niche, form a firm, figure out the logistics on everything from name, tech, space, insurance, marketing, and actually launch the firm. Sound nuts, but why not?

If not a firm, perhaps a practice group or strategic initiative to become part of an existing law firm.

You’d have more talent, brains, experience in starting things, and energy on the site than you’d have in existing law firms.

Provide the winning teams (a lawyer or two on a team), as their prize, ongoing support from lawyers, technology, and marketing professionals. I’d give them a better fighting chance of pulling it off than some law students who, without any support, felt compelled to put up a shingle on their own.

Get law schools, alumni associations, law firms, publishers, and technology companies such as LexBlog as sponsors.

Maybe the winning teams cannot support themselves solely as practicing lawyers to start and need to supplement their income with a second job. But it’s a start. Plus each of the weekend warriors, winner or not, would build a heck of a network.

I am sure many of you think this idea is half baked. But law has much to learn from outside innovation. What’s not to learn from 100,000 entrepreneurs in 400 cities around the world.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Philippe Lewicki