How Law Insider monetized a massive database of legal documents

The government publishes troves of contracts but doesn't do a good job of indexing them.

Image via Pxhere

There’s a common misperception that many non-lawyers have about how legal contracts are written. Most people probably assume that a lawyer writes each contract from scratch, but in reality the lawyer is most likely copy and pasting clauses and sections from already-existing contracts and modifying them for their particular client.

One of the resources lawyers often turn to for this is Law Insider. Founded in 2010, Law Insider indexes the millions of contracts that have been uploaded to the SEC website by publicly traded companies. It generates over 4 million monthly pageviews and has over 250,000 registered users, about 5,000 of whom pay $30 a month to access its archives.

I recently interviewed the site’s co-founder Preston Clark about how he and his partners came up with the idea, what they did to build up its massive audience, and why they’re expanding into a full-fledged media company that produces everything from articles to YouTube videos.

To listen to the interview, subscribe to The Business of Content on your favorite podcast player. If you scroll down you’ll also find some transcribed highlights from the interview.

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This transcript has been edited for clarity.

The launch of Law Insider

Preston started his career as an in-house lawyer before moving on to a job selling SaaS products. “Through my role as a salesperson, I got to know several legal technology startups like Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom. I realized that these sites,  in very simple ways, have started aggregating publicly available legal information. And it got me thinking, what if we really went deep on this and tried to compile the world's largest contract database, and then if we could get smart with the data and how we organized search, we could potentially build something lawyers would actually use.”

Given his background as a lawyer, Preston knew that there was huge demand for access to already-existing legal contracts. “Lawyers draft contracts the same way a business person drafts a contract, which is you don't start with a blank piece of paper. You're always starting with something, a template of a contract you used previously, a contract you got from a friend or a colleague, and so aggregating everything seemed like a really, really valuable resource. But in order for it to ultimately work, you'd have to really have a high level of adoption.” Most lawyers turn to Google when searching for contracts, so whatever site Preston and his cofounders launched would require several months for its content to get adequately indexed within search engine results. 

So where would Law Insider find a large database of contracts? There was one obvious candidate: the SEC. “Publicly traded companies need to publish material documents to their business. Some of those are press releases, some of those are financial filings, and some of them are contracts. It turns out a lot of them are contracts. We found a way to extract and aggregate and organize those contracts. We weren't the first to do it, we haven't been the last, we just think we've been the most focused on it. This is all we do. All we do is contracts. We’re adding thousands of documents every month.”

They launched Law Insider in 2010 and ran it as a side hustle for several years. As the repository got bigger, the site received more and more traffic. They eventually began aggregating contracts from other government websites. “We now rank in the first page for literally tens of thousands of keywords. In many cases we'll rank not just in the first two spots, we'll rank on all 10 spots on the first page of Google, because it's such a long tail that we've developed over the years.”

Monetization

Within a few years, Law Insider was generating millions of pageviews a month, and its founders began to think more deeply about how to monetize it. They started by installing a registration wall that required frequent users of the site to register with their email address. Law Insider quickly amassed a fairly large mailing list. “And then about two years ago we flipped the switch on a premium membership model.”

How did it work? “It's all integrated into the experience. The best analog for our business is Shutterstock. You go online, you conduct a Google search for a guy on his phone, you see a bunch of images of a guy on a phone, all of which have watermarks. You click on one of those watermarked photos and end up on  Shutterstock’s website, which gives you some options. You can download this one image for X dollars, or you can upgrade your subscription and get all the images you want, or some variation of that. And that's effectively what we did.” Basically, if someone lands on Law Insider’s site, they’re allowed to download a few contracts for free. “But there are thousands of people who need more than that. And those are the people who we’re trying to build a subscription around. They get some value for free, and at some point we say, ‘start a free trial.’ A trial goes between seven days and 30 days, but it's typically seven. And if you continue on after your trial, then it's $30 a month, or $250 a year. And that's the simplicity of it.”

It’s been about two years since Law Insider launched the paid membership. “We're close to 5,000 active paying subscribers now. The growth rate is good. We have a churn problem for sure, but we got from zero to 5,000 in two years, so the churn problem isn't preventing us from growing at a healthy rate. It's just preventing us from blowing up, and so we have to solve it.”

Expanding beyond contracts 

Now that Law Insider is generating revenue, it’s able to expand into new verticals, including editorial content. “There are so many adjacent stories and educational materials that we can pack into this. As someone who did a lot of content marketing earlier in my career, it's just so exciting, because now we can start telling the stories and building use cases around our ideal customer profile and moving people through an engagement journey with us in a way that is much more proactive than just waiting there for them to download another document.”

Law Insider isn’t just creating article content; it recently launched a YouTube show called Contract Teardown. “We totally stole this idea from a company called ProfitWell that does pricing analytics and consulting for SaaS companies. They'll look at how a company like HubSpot or Salesforce prices its services and whether or not it’s adopting a good pricing strategy.” Contract Teardown does something similar, except it’s analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of contracts signed by major corporations. “So many lawyers have strong opinions about very specific documents or provisions, and we bring them on, we give them a platform, and we have a host that’s tearing down an agreement and walking through what aspects of it are good or bad, or could have been drafted better.”

Law Insider has only recently begun to experiment with this kind of editorial content, but so far the engagement is encouraging. “Each video gets anywhere from 1,500 to 3,000 views. We get a really good response from our subscribers. We're just at the beginning stages of this, but we feel good about it.” 

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Simon Owens is a tech and media journalist living in Washington, DC. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Email him at simonowens@gmail.com. For a full bio, go here.