Law Is About To Get Uber-ified. And Julia Shapiro Couldn’t Be Happier.

After Julia Shapiro graduated from law school, she set off on a career that few of her peers would follow. While she was on the “big law” track, she ended up doing some contract work on the side. To her surprise, she really enjoyed working for different companies and coming in and out of people’s lives.

“I liked the flexibility, I liked the freedom and I liked all the really interesting people I met there,” she said. “I worked with opera singers, I worked with novelists, I worked with real estate entrepreneurs. There were so many people pursuing really cool passions.”

It was 2007 and Shapiro didn’t know that the very nature of the work she was describing would soon comprise an entire new class of work: the now ever-present on-demand economy. Ahead of the workplace trend, Shapiro started to think about ways that she could make the legal profession — one of the most rigid career paths anyone can embark on — more flexible for the modern day worker. She watched as her classmates from law school entered rigorous jobs at big time firms, lost all sense of work-life balance and complained about being unsatisfied. There simply had to be a better way, she thought.  

Her solution was to create a platform that took law from uber structured to just plain Uber. Hire An Esquire — the startup she launched in 2011 along with her co-founder Jules Miller — is an online marketplace that allows companies to search for lawyers looking for work, recruit them, manage their workflow and pay them directly. The startup even provides health insurance and benefits for the lawyers on the platform who fill out W-2s, a perk that not many companies in the gig economy are now offering.

With more than $1 million in funding from mostly angel backers and 4,300 attorneys using the platform, Shapiro’s pushing to make sure Hire An Esquire keeps a big enough lead that other competitors can’t catch up.

“You know when you’re a little kid and you wake up and all the yards of grass are all covered in snow and you get the first one to run across it? That’s exactly what law is like right now with technology,” she said. “We're like where every other industry was in the mid-90s and there’s so much cool stuff you can do.”

In an interview with LinkedIn, she talked about her initial inspiration for launching the company, where she sees the legal profession moving in the next decade and her advice for entrepreneurs looking for their very own patch of untouched snow.

Edited excerpts:

Caroline Fairchild: When did you realize a product like Hire An Esquire was necessary?

Julia Shapiro: When I was working at Pepper Hamilton, I worked more with the team that was staffing contract attorneys. I realized how incredibly horrible the staffing agencies were. I knew they weren’t good from the attorney’s perspective. It tended to be a race to the bottom as far as wages went. They weren’t very transparent. At the time in 2007, before the economy crashed, they would bill an attorney out for over $100 an hour to a law firm or client and then the attorney would get paid less than $30 an hour. They also had bad working conditions and they would rip the rug out from underneath people in not a very nice way. It was also lot of paperwork and a lot of friction that shouldn’t exist in the millennial generation. So, that’s when I decided the process had to change.

CF: Did you get the sense back then that the world of work was changing?

JS: There was already this energy in the air that the world was changing, the economy was changing and the way people worked was changing. So, I also saw a lot of my peers no longer accepting the status quo of the partner track. While they were doing contract work they were setting up their own law firm or they were finding contract work on Craigslist for small law firms, and this whole world was coming together with the on-demand economy and it was going into law.

CF: Why do you think you were the first person to think this?

JS: As part of the millennial generation, I grew up on computers. I was in college at the end of the first tech boom and saw the world through technology and saw how industries can transform with technology. Another factor is just luck. Contract work in law is a pretty niche market. Not as many people are exposed to it. Most people have a lot of debt from law school and undergrad so they are behind paying their bills and they wouldn’t even have the time to consider [contract work]. I, fortunately, listened to my father who convinced me to go to school on scholarship.

CF: What was some of the initial resistance you came up against when getting the idea off the ground?

JS: There was a lot of suspicion from law firms initially. They did not like technology. It’s changed a lot. In 2011, I heard that nobody would ever use this. People would say, ‘Lawyers aren’t going to go on the Internet to do this.’ But we had hundreds of attorneys sign up who were so excited about what we were doing. So, the attorney adoption, we didn’t really get much resistance.

CF: What was the tipping point for the law firms then?

JS: [Last year] was a turning point in legal tech. Most lawyers finally started to accept that the world was changing and that temporary and flexible staffing wasn’t going away and neither was the Internet. They realized everything was going to be done that way. We cost a lot less than a normal staffing agency and in some cases, we had the clients introducing us to their law firms and demanding that the law firms use us. Strong recommendations and introductions really helped.

CF: You raised your money in Philadelphia. Is that an easy market to get funding?

JS: It was next to impossible. Whenever we started raise money, it was just so traditional and so conservative. I wasn’t from there and there seemed to be this club that you couldn’t get into unless you grew up there and went to private schools. There also wasn’t a lot of investment happening in Philadelphia. The market was very conservative and the market was investing in mostly established products. It wasn’t a leading market and we needed investment from people who wanted to lead.

CF: Did you find any of the funds and groups focused on female-led companies helpful?

JS: There are a lot things branded as helping female entrepreneurs, but they tend to focus on mentorship and advice. What you really need to grow your company, especially after you’ve been around the block a bit and you know your business, is money to scale. Everyone has really good intentions. Everybody really, really wants to help. I’m rooting for them. I want them to be successful, but I didn’t really find that we got any bumps or advantages from them.

CF: Do you think the difficulty you had raising money had anything to do with being a woman?

JS: It’s hard to raise money as a woman. People make assumptions about you. You get very subtle comments. The problem is the reactions we’ve gotten being female founders, you don’t talk about publicly because it wouldn’t be good for your company or your brand. One of the things I’ve heard a lot of female founders say is that you hear that your product isn’t scalable. Meanwhile, the investor will have companies similar to yours in another industry or another model that are considered scalable. They tell female founders they should do it as a lifestyle business.

CF: Now that you’ve got the funding, what do you do with it?

JS: Our goal for our capital is to take over the market. We are the first to market technology in our space and we want to change the way lawyers work for good. We want to help with a lot of the pain points in the legal industry. Everything from attorneys having tons of pressure and no work-life balance to being insecure about their job because it’s a very volatile time in the legal industry. We want to change the dynamics for how they work and give them more options. We also want to help law firms hedge against that same risk. We want them to be more flexible toward business cycles. You can adapt better to the modern economy if you can make your work more flexible and essentially have an on-demand workforce.

CF: Look out 10 years for me. How much can the industry really change?

JS: Within ten years we’re going to see a lot more automation and a lot more transparency in everyday legal services from the basic things that the everyday consumer needs. I think services will be more like 75 percent automated with a final lawyer review. I do believe that within 10 years deregulation will happen and non-lawyers [will be able to] own law firms and paralegals will help consumers. More technology and business practices will be introduced that will make it a better experience for both consumers and enterprise overall.

CF: What is your advice for entrepreneurs looking to disrupt an entirely new industry?

JS: Find a problem that's very close to you that not a lot of other people know about that you really are in the best state in solving and you can’t sleep until you solve it. You’re going to go through a lot of adversity and you have to basically run through brick walls. If you’re not super passionate about what you do, you’re not going to be able to drive yourself to do it every day for years. And if everybody else is running their heads through the same brick wall as you, there is more competition.

Read the stories of more top professionals 35 and under:

Finally, A Ben & Jerry’s For Millennials

Can This Founder Get The World Comfortable With Nuclear Energy?

 The Surprising Way One Of The Most Popular Silicon Valley Founders Built His Network 

Tinder’s Co-Founder Is Reinventing The Dating Scene. This Time, Women Go First.

‘I Am Not A Purple Alien. I Am A Young Female That Has Automotive Engineering Experience.’

For more posts from LinkedIn's New Economy Editor Caroline Fairchild, click the follow button at the top of this post and follow her on Twitter here.