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“We were thinking a lot about how the startup community views lawyers,” said Craig Jacoby, chair of the emerging companies group at Cooley LLP. Cooley is a business law firm focused on startups with 14 lawyers in its Colorado offices and hundreds more nationwide. “There was a pretty big disconnection between the type of information that was presented on our basic website and the type of conversations that we have with startups when we talk to them about their concerns. How do we actually talk to people? How do we translate that into something we can present?”
To more directly address entrepreneurs' day-to-day concerns, Cooley launched CooleyGO in July of this year, a web portal featuring trends, documents, and guidance. CooleyGO is “about taking all these issues we get repeatedly from clients and helping them navigate the terrain,” said Jacoby.
CooleyGO is designed as more than an information portal – it's a learning experience for businesspeople who want to take a hands-on approach to legal matters. Jacoby said this clears up a common misconception about the legal profession.
“If you think we're charging a lot of money for pulling a document off the shelf and putting your name on it, we're not.” said Jacoby. "There's a difference between documents and guidance.” CooleyGO's documents are free. And when you're done with those, you may rethink what sort of guidance you need.
Since its launch in July, Jacoby said, CooleyGO has seen steady and encouraging use. “Lots of people use the document generators and data.”
However, “we never intended this to be a lead-generation machine. We do, on the site, have a section for trends. There's a lot of really good information about the financing environment.” But the site itself is less about traffic and metrics than it is about building relationships and providing a resource to the community.
