You thought Tesco Law was bad? Here comes Google Law

Back in 2010 I posed the question of whether somebody, somewhere was fine-tuning their plans to become the Google of legal services.

Turns out the answer was yes, and that the somebody is... Google.

Well, kind of. TechCrunch and Forbes reported yesterday that Google Ventures (the venture capital arm of Google) has participated in an $18.5m (£11.4m) funding round obtained by Rocket Lawyer.

Rocket Lawyer is a US-based service which provides online legal and services and documentation as well as access to local attorneys. Samantha Collier's Social Media for Law Firms blog has a good breakdown of exactly how Rocket Lawyer works for lawyers and clients, but it extends beyond simply providing legal documents. They offer a $200-$300 per year on call legal advice service, legal health checks and access to local attorneys in the relevant state.

This online legal service market seems to be more evolved in the US (and of course there are other players involved like LegalZoom which have also attracted big chunks of venture capital funding). This is despite the fact that the market environment is arguably much more hostile than it would be in the UK. LegalZoom has been subject to class actions and challenges by State Bar Associations (in North Carolina amongst others) on the basis of allegations that its services constitute the unlicensed practice of law. It is worth pointing out that Rocket Lawyer has been keen to differentiate itself from LegalZoom in this regard.

Given that only a handful of legal services are actually reserved activities in the UK there should be much less scope for challenges of this nature (even prior to the introduction of Alternative Business Structures).

Obviously, Google's venture capital arm investing in an online legal services provider isn't the same as Google providing legal services. There are some obvious synergies though between Google Docs and Rocket Lawyer's document service, which stores your legal documents in the cloud and allows collaboration between multiple users, and it wouldn't be surprising to see further integration between the two in the future (the fact that David Drummond, who is on the board of Rocket Lawyer, is also senior vice president of corporate development and chief legal officer at Google doesn't exactly mitigate against this either).

LexisNexis, a major player in the UK market, also invested in Rocket Lawyer in a previous funding round and are represented on the board.

So could we see Rocket Lawyer or Google Law in the UK any time soon? There are obviously a number of online providers in the market already (MyLawyer from Epoq for example and the recently floated in-deed on the conveyancing front).

The market is hardly saturated though, and if Google really get behind Rocket Lawyer it could be hard to compete with its marketing reach and cloud document storage infrastructure.

Could it be that lawyers have been worrying too much about Tesco and not enough about Google?

Jon Bloor is a corporate solicitor who blogs as both iPadLawyer and Peninsulawyer. Click here to follow Jon on Twitter.