Matching clients with lawyers

First it was legal research, then filing of court documents. Now lawyering goes online.

A first by the legal fraternity here, four young lawyers have started a portal, WWLegal.com, to serve the public and over 100 Singapore law firms.

They started out as brick-and-mortar lawyers, each with at least a decade of experience.

Now, they are offering online lawyering, a service which they say will make the law cheaper and more accessible to the "lawyer-shy" Singaporean.

Ong Ying Ping, director of Marketing, Content Development, of WWLegal.com., said: "We're focusing on the role of the online lawyer to bring about all this solving of problems online and to save the clients' time and heartache if possible. To make law, actually, more simple for people to understand and to actually for them to see that being aware of your rights can actually help you save money in a lot of critical situations."

Membership is free and users fill out an online form stating their problem or question.

Without human intervention, the system will match the client with a suitable lawyer from any of the 100 firms signed up.

Clients pay S$80 via credit card for the initial online advice, and they may engage the lawyer to handle the case, if the need arises.

"We used to think that people wouldn't ever buy a car online, it's all being done. It's just a matter of common sense," Ong said.

"If I found that it took me S$20,000 to bring a case to completion in the courts, and there are lawyers who know how to guide me step-by-step through a much cheaper and effective process, they after a while, the question should be 'Why not?' and not 'Why I should do this?'"

Besides the matching and payment service, WWLegal.com has also developed another patent-pending software for lawyers to handle case management.

This will free up lawyers to concentrate on the law, instead of tracking paperwork.

The portal will be officially launched Thursday and if successful, there are plans to extend it to other countries in the region with similar legal frameworks.