Robert Ambrogi BlogElevator Pitch: We help legal teams ditch the billable hour for good in exchange for flat fee and subscription legal services. Within Fidu, law firms transform their manual actions, disjointed processes, and document templates into one-to-many legal products, automated workflows, and collaborative legal projects. All of this is packaged and delivered to clients in a firm-branded portal that’s the hub for the firm’s client experience. With Fidu, legal teams stop selling time for money and start scaling impact.
What makes you unique or innovative? Fidu will transform the business model of the trillion-dollar legal industry by helping law firms and legal teams successfully eliminate the billable hour for good in exchange for sustainable and scalable subscription legal services. To achieve this transformation, our product leverages the subscription design methodology developed by cofounder Kim Bennett based on her 10+ years of experience pioneering the model in her law firm and over 4 years of experience successfully teaching lawyers how to implement the model in their law firms. Together with Kim’s experience, expertise, and methodology, we combine cofounder Blaine Korte’s extensive product development and legal tech experience to build one platform for lawyers to transform their businesses with subscription legal services.
What problem do you solve? With today’s legal technology, the path to building a subscription practice seems elusive, even impractical. But that’s just not the case. Instead, the current problem is today’s legal tools are built on the premise that the hourly model is king, putting the focus on TIME, not VALUE FOR CLIENTS. And, by focusing on time – – we have created an outdated, ineffective, and broken business model that’s no longer sustainable or scalable. By eliminating the hourly billing model in exchange for the value-driven subscription service model, we will:
- Bring consistent revenue and scalable legal services to solo and small firms.
- Provide a sustainable and scalable model to decrease the access to justice gap; and
- Reduce lawyer burnout and improve overall lawyer wellbeing.
Your competitors? Our primary competition is disjointed DIY solutions. When firms experiment with subscriptions, they cobble together multiple solutions to streamline delivery, DIY their own solutions at great time and expense, or they simply continue working like they always have resulting in low margins, a poor client experience, high churn, sub-par security, non-compliance to ethical standards, and – worst of all – they often switch back to hourly.
In-market, our competition is largely client portals that are either built into practice management tools which primarily offer communication and file sharing features but do little to help firms switch from one-to-one interactions to process-driven, repeatable, one-to-many products and services.
Demo video: https://www.fidulegal.com/demo-video
Founded: 10/15/2019, Saskatoon, Can.
Target customer. Our target customers are small and solo law firms who offer flat-fee and subscription legal services.
Some examples of paying customers include:
- A 3-person law firm that offers a subscription for automotive dealership clients, offering staff training, a personalized contract library, audits, handbooks, access to attorney calls, and more.
- A 2-person intellectual property firm that serves 6-7 figure impact-driven non-profit and for-profit organizations via strategy-focused subscription and flat-fee legal services.
- A 3-person intellectual property firm that provides transactional and litigation services to small businesses via flat-fee and hourly legal services.
- A solo firm offering a membership program for small business clients, providing resources, contracts and agreements, document reviews, and access to attorney office hours.
Price. $99 for 2 users; additional users are $29/user.
Expected 2022/2023 gross revenue? N/A
Number of users/paying customers? N/A
Traction to date. Initially founded in 2019, Fidu relaunched in January 2021 when Kimberly Bennett joined as a cofounder. With the addition of Kim to the founding team, we refined our product to focus on helping legal teams deliver and scale their subscription services.
Since our relaunch, we’ve worked to achieve product-market fit through refining our product with our early adopter customer base. To date, we have achieved a 95% retention rate, have happy and referring customers, and success stories to share.
In one example, a Fidu customer added 80% of their previous year’s revenue within the first 5 months of launching their first subscription ever. And that’s not even the biggest success story for that client.
We’ve been able to drive success stories like this and others with, until very recently, a two-person team.
In addition to our product and customer success stories, we have achieved great traction outside of our customer base including:
- In October 2021, we won Clio’s prestigious Launch//Code competition, where we took home the $100,000 Grand Prize as well as the Viewer’s Choice Award.
- In April 2022, we achieved top 3 at the StartupTNT, Summit V investment competition.
- In July 2022, at Canada’s premier pitch event, Startupfest we achieved: Top 5 Best in Fest Pitch competition, Top 10 Women in Technology pitch competition, Top 10 Black Founder, and we were the only company to achieve top-10 status across the top 3 competition categories.
- In Oct 2022, we closed our first round of angel investors.
For 2021 and 2022, our highlights included customer growth, customer retention, product-market fit, and significant achievements inside and outside of the legal industry. In 2023, we are excited to take it to the next level. As we embark on version 2 of our platform, we will take the knowledge of our co-founders, the experience of our customers, and the feedback on our features, to build the best-in-class stand-alone client experience platform that allows legal teams to expand their delivery of flat fee and subscription legal services.
Plan for growth over next five years. N/A
Outside funding. N/A
Describe any ways in which your company is diverse or promotes diversity. We are a diverse founder team – woman, black, Canadian – committed to transforming the outdated, ineffective, and unhealthy business model of the legal industry. This includes building a legal tech company and leadership team that’s anti-racist, that’s reflective of the diverse legal industry and community in which we serve, and that leads with team well-being at the forefront.
From inclusive and equitable recruiting and hiring practices to a commitment to building a team and company culture that reflects our intersectional team, we are committed to not just stating our values, but living them daily.
Outside of the organization, we are committed to being an activist brand. A brand that is an ally to communities overlooked and an advocate for those whose voices are often ignored.