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Venture Capital - Thursday, April 19, 2007

Prelaunch Online Legal Startup Avvo Raises $10M

Avvo has closed $10M in series B financing led by Seattle-based Ignition Partners with Benchmark Capital, who led Avvo's Series A round of financing. Avvo has raised $13M to date. The company is led by Mark Britton who was EVP at InterActiveCorp Travel and Expedia. Former MSFT SVP Brad Silverberg joined the board which already included Rich Barton, Zillow's CEO.

We have been following the company but it is still not telling us what exactly it plans to do. CEO Britton made these statements today:
"Lawyers have done a phenomenal job of building a great industry. It is an industry that helps consumers and helps all of us in a lot of ways, but the problem for consumers is that it is just hard to navigate."

"Getting to that understanding of what lawyers do and what they do for consumers and what they do well, it is just hard. We would like to take some of that pain and remove it from the legal industry."

Competitors in this space would seem to be LA-based LegalZoom which was co-founded by famed attorney Robert Shapiro, which recently raised a venture capital round led by Polaris Venture Partners. It is a self service site that helps consumers and small businesses take care of legal matters such as wills, divorces and copyrights without hiring expensive lawyers.

Another is FreeAdvice, which runs a forum where people can post questions about legal issues or upload their case to have it reviewed by an attorney. Thompson-owned Findlaw claims it is the highest-trafficked legal Web site. Also Nolo.com (a book and software publisher) is a popular source of online legal information.

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