New Site Offers Lead Gen for Lawyers

Attorney and Web entrepreneur Curtis Wolfe wants WhoCanISue.com to become as common a name in the world of online legal searching as Lending Tree is when it comes to online mortgage research.

Wolfe is founder and CEO of WhoCanISue.com, a new Web service allowing people to determine if they have likely grounds for a lawsuit; if they do, it provides lists of local lawyers who bid for placement in those results.

What will make WhoCanISue.com different from others in the field is the fact that users need not reveal any confidential information and are contacted only by the lawyers they choose, said Wolfe.

The system asks users a series of questions about their situations, continually refining the questions. In doing so, it not only determines what type of litigation is in order, whether there is basis for a lawsuit at all. It will also provide a lot of information about the law, written in easy-to-understand language, so users can do their own research.

Those who appear to have bona fide cases land on a page where they are presented with the names and contact information for about five local lawyers specializing in the field of law that pertains to their situation.

The system will allow a number of communication methods, including instant messaging, between prospective clients and the attorneys. Subsequent pages, containing ads by more lawyers, will be available. The lawyers who bid the most get the highest placement.

“They determine how much they want to pay,” said Wolfe. “A banner ad is placed on the page and the users can mouse over the ad and up will pop the lawyer’s profile information including information about the firm, its attorneys, where its offices are located, some history, and the types of cases they handle.”

According to Borrell Associates, legal services advertisers spend $133 million annually on online advertising, $91 million of which goes towards national campaigns.

The Web site will be free for customers and Wolfe said he and his company will not ask for a cut of the lawyers’ fees. “I don�t want a piece of the action,” he said. “I am not practicing law and I am not involved in any of that. That is between the client and the attorney.”

However, the site will be open to a “mix” of advertisers. Wolfe also has plans to heavily advertise WhoCanISue.com itself. “Certainly we are going to do SEO and SEM. We are going to do significant television, radio and outdoor ad campaigns focusing on target markets at first, and hopefully growing it into a national ad campaign. We’d like to become the Lending Tree of legal services.”

Wolfe is founder of mRevolution, a 2-year-old online affiliate marketing and lead generation company. MRevolution is the holding company for WhoCanISue.com.

The site will be open for consumers in the autumn. Currently, Wolfe is recruiting lawyers who want to become part of the “network.”