Legal Q&A site LawPivot raises $600,000

Google Ventures, and angels - David Tisch (TechStars), Richard Chen (founder of AngelPad) invest

In yet another sign that Q&A sites are highly sought after, LawPivot, a Q&A site focusing on legal questions, announced late Wednesday that it secured $600,000 in venture financing from Google Ventures, and high-profile angels, including David Tisch from TechStars and Richard Chen, founder of AngelPad. 

LawPivot, which was one of the semi-finalists in our Vator Splash September event in San Francisco, will also be moving its six-person team to the Google Startup Lab, which is essentially a top-notch workspace at Google, set aside for startups funded by Google Ventures. This is a nice change, since the group had been working out of CEO and co-founder Jay Mandal's house.

"There are inefficiencies in the delivery of legal services, and there is a huge opportunity for a technology-driven disruption.  The LawPivot team has created an intelligent online solution that connects companies to the legal answers they need,” said Google Ventures Partner Wesley Chan.  

Additionally, LawPivot, which recently launched in August 2010, released a new personalized recommendation algorithm that connects a company to the best lawyers to answer its legal questions. 

The recommendation feature will allow LawPivot users to select lawyers based on different rankings. For instance, a person can choose a lawyer who ranks high because he has a high-response rate. Or they may choose an attorney who responds quickly. Or a user can select a lawyer who ranks high as a general community contributor.   

Q&A sites are getting a lot of attention in the past year. Earlier this year, Formspring raised $11.5 million from Benchmark. In December, Twitter bought Q&A site Fluther. In October, ChaCha raised $20 million, bringing total funds to date to nearly $72 million.  Last spring, Quora raised $11 million for a reported $86 million. And, at the start of last year, Google bought Aardvark. Other startups are emerging in this space, like Law Pivot, a Q&A site just for legal advice, which launched last August. Meanwhile, other lesser-known, non-VC-backed startups, such as JustAnswer, are making solid revenue by allowing experts to charge for providing answers.