A Sacramento-based Smartphone app for people with legal questions recently made a splash by winning a tech contest and signing up users. In October, Quicklegal Inc. just launched its app for Apple and Android users. The application links people who have legal questions with attorneys seeking clients. Users can ask some questions for free. They can also pay $39 for 15 minutes of legal advice in real time on the app. The app puts the customer face- to-face with the attorney in an on-demand video chat. The app seeks an attorney near the user, and then it allows the user to select a legal specialty. Attorneys pay $500 a month to be on the app. The service pays for itself if the attorney takes one call a day, and more than pays for itself if the attorney gets retained by a client, said CEO Derek Bluford.Derek Bluford

The app so far has signed 140 attorneys in California, and it has 500 consumer users, Bluford said. Quicklegal contacted state bars and attorney generals in other states, and it is preparing to scale up to a nationwide business, he said. “We’re finding attorneys are very interested in the application,” Bluford said. In October, Quicklegal spent a month going through the month-long Founder’s Space incubator program in San Francisco as its app went live. It also took the top spot in a pitch contest — winning $50,000 in cash and other prizes — at Techweek Los Angeles 2014 in Santa Monica last week. More than 1,000 companies competed in Techweek. The company has paid its own startup costs of about $650,000, and is now looking to raise about $1 million from investors, Bluford said. So far it has commitments for $200,000 of that capital. At Techweek, the company pitched to Silicon Valley venture funds — some of which said the company should move to the Bay Area, Bluford said. But he doesn’t want to move the company. “It’s time to get Sacramento on the map.”

Quicklegal’s offices are in downtown Sacramento, where it has 15 employees. Article Resource – customers-with-legal-questions-with-attorneys-in-real-timehttps:// customers-with-legal-questions-with-attorneys-in-real-time