This month Total Attorneys turns 10 years old. Wow, what a ride so far. We took the path less traveled. We bootstrapped, starting the business in a Bucktown apartment with little more than a credit card, laptop and cell phone.
We have built a great business; one that powers thousands of law firms across the county, one that is transforming an old world industry for the better through technology, one that has improved access to justice for consumers nationwide, one that has launched careers through a fantastic work envirnment, one that was built in Chicago.
Want to be a part of the story? Total Attorneys is hiring
Here is an article from Law.com that published orginally here
Total Attorneys Receives $15M Bain Investment
Brendan McKenna
Law Technology News
05-03-2012
Total Attorneys, a web-based practice management and legal marketing company founded in 2002, has received a $15 million capital investment from Bain Capital Ventures, the venture capital investment arm of Boston's Bain Capital. BCV is known for its work with early-stage companies, and will take an undisclosed stake in the Chicago-based company in exchange for its investment.
Ed Scanlan, founder and chairman of Total Attorneys, said that the investment will allow his company to "continue to develop its web-based practice management and customer acquisition platform." Some of the money will assist with Total Attorneys' marketing endeavors, as well. "With a $1 per user per month base license cost, we are experiencing tremendous growth," he added. Other offerings, such as lead generation, cost extra and are a significant source of revenue for the company. Scanlan declined to disclose Total Attorneys' revenue and employee headcount.
Scanlan said that Total Attorneys has found success with Total Apps, its apps for small firms, launched last month. It has been designed with a "one-stop-shop" approach in mind, according to Scanlan, and includes partnerships with third-party providers, including Fastcase for legal research and Capital Payments for payment processing.
"Bain Capital Ventures was attracted to the company due to our unique, performance-driven marketing solutions, our feature-rich, turnkey SaaS practice management platform, and our growth," Scanlan said, adding that additional hires are possible in the coming year, in the areas of software development, customer service, user experience, and marketing.
Reached by telephone, BCV partner Deepak Sindwani noted that small firms are responsible for $100 billion a year in revenue, one-third of the total for the legal industry as a whole. Research, he said, shows that the largest spending category for these attorneys is marketing, a specialty of Total Attorneys through its lead generation and other services.
Sindwani also added that while the market is sizable for small firms, it remains very fragmented, another reason that BCV sought to invest in Total Attorneys. While BCV looked at competitors in the small law firms market segment, he said ultimately it was Total Attorneys' product offerings and staff that prompted the investment.
He also voiced support for the recent hire of Paul Ford as company CEO, and expressed admiration for Ford's success growing, and ultimately selling, earlier companies he was involved in. Ford had been a Total Attorneys board member since 2010.
Katey Wood, an analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group, says that the move signals a "continued need for affordably priced solutions for solo practitioners hanging out their own shingles in the marketplace, as Big Law continues to struggle and lawyers grow more entrepreneurial." She also sees the investment as part of a larger acceptance of "SaaS-based, Web 2.0 and apps-store style software from a new generation of attorneys."
Wood believes that there is a "need for newer software vendors to scale and market effectively in order establish themselves against the old guard of legal software and service providers like Lexis and West that begin conditioning the market as early as law school."
Sindwani was asked whether BCV might consider future legal technology investments. He said that while they were not dedicating a lot of focus to legal technology, it's "an interesting market," and they are "open to it."
