The Story of Divorce-Online
by Mark Keenan
Note from Delia... I received the press release below from Mark Keenan of Divorce-Online in early March. I then asked him a number of questions as you can see from the Question and Answer session which follows.Online divorce service helps 5000th customer Divorce-Online (at www.divorce-online.co.uk), the online divorce service, has announced that it has processed its 5000th divorce since launching their service in May 2000. The service which allows consumers to undertake their own divorce proceedings without a lawyer for just £85.00 has saved the consumer a massive £4 million in legal fees over the course of the last 2 ¾ years and deals with people from all social classes from famous actors to low income housewives and is a vital service for people living abroad who cannot easily get access to legal advice in the UK. |
Delia: You have just sold your 5,000th set of legal forms for divorce since launching the service in May 2000. This is pretty impressive and rather contradicts my comment, in the last newsletter, that companies selling legal services online have gone rather quiet recently. Could you tell us something about the service you offer and your website?
Mark: The idea for Divorce-Online came to me in early 1999 when I was working as a Family Law Executive for a high street practice. I saw that there were not many websites that dealt with divorce in the UK and my research led me to a number of pro se services in the US and Canada. I thought that it should be possible to do something similar in this country.
I initially used my skills to offer a straight forward self help divorce service, which was not e-commerce enabled and which I built and managed after working hours.
I spent endless hours optimising the site so it would be picked up by the search engines and I exchanged links with other sites. I started to get very good page rankings with engines such as Yahoo and later Google and the site became the most visited family law website in the UK.
In the meantime I was approached by an investor who had just sold a "life stage" website to a leading ISP to see if I would be interested in taking the concept further. The rest as they say is history.
The website (a section of it is shown here) is intended to be a one stop shop for people going through divorce
and separation and is updated on a daily basis. It is also community based
which allows users to interact with each other and with professionals from a
variety of disciplines.
The commercial aspect of the business is a range of self help services which include the divorce service, a consent order drafting and separation agreement service, wills, change of name documents, cohabitation and pre-nuptial agreements. All of these are designed to save the consumer legal fees at any given point in a procedure. For instance we find that many consumers ask us to draft an agreement and then have a lawyer give advice on the agreement before it is executed.
All our services are supported by a free telephone or e-mail support service so consumers can be confident that there will be a human being able to answer their query. Most of our competitors fail on this score. We also attract substantial advertising revenues.
Most of our budget for marketing is spent online with search engines where people are likely to first look for information. We have also retained a Public Relations company whose sole purpose is to get us into the national and regional press and to facilitate good relations with relevant journalists for whom we often source case studies. This means that we are always in the media and this has helped us gain brand recognition. The aim is to have people think divorce=Divorce-Online, in the same way people think chocolate=Cadbury's. One of the first steps we took was to join the Which Web Trader Scheme as we felt it was very important to help build trust in our services and the principles of the scheme are applied rigorously.
We have preferred organic growth to a push for page numbers and market share. We are also very “niche” and this helps define a brand identity to the public at large.
Delia: I notice from the "About Us" section of your site that you give full details about the company and also information about the people involved. This is rather rare, with many other sites providing online services being extremely reticent about who they are really. Could you give us a short version of this and in particular tell us a bit about yourself and the other people in the company?
Mark: Being transparent is not only very important ethically, it is also a requirement under EU law that a company provide details about itself. We have always gone beyond what is required of us to engender confidence in the user. We have listed the key figures on the board of the company as well as managerial staff within the organisation.
I am the founder and Managing Director of the company and I am responsible for the day to day management of the business. I am a former Family Law Executive with 13 years legal experience mainly in family law.
Our board consists of the our main investor, and two other directors including a non executive director. They are not from the legal world but have commercial experience. We have also listed our Managers who deal with the technical aspects of the website and customer services. It is important that they be given an identity as it creates a human element to the website.
Delia: You have a panel of solicitors for which people can search and you charge a firm £150 a year to be included in this directory. How many firms are on the list and do they receive many enquiries?
Mark: We have 202 featured firms listed on our Directory and it is very successful in matching clients with firms from all over England and Wales. Our churn rate has been very low as we have provided a good return for the majority of our Solicitor clients. It is a common sense proposition for a family law firm to spend what is in reality the equivalent of one hour of one fee earners time on a website that attracts such large numbers of visitors looking for information and services about family law.
Delia: Is a company such as yours better at selling legal documents than a firm of solicitors? If so, why?
Mark: We have invested in and created our own branded "LegalPac" software and back office database systems that allow us to process a large amount of documentation securely, easily and efficiently at a low price to the consumer. We are a volume based business and our business model works on that basis. A firm of Solicitors would not have the time, money or flexibility to be able to undertake this without a massive amount of investment to create brand awareness.
Delia: What is the actual process you use to provide the documents, e.g. word documents or rtf or pdf or hotdocs?
Mark: The actual documents are produced in rtf format so they can be used by most word processing packages. The user completes a simple wizard based executable program (unless on a Mac, then a word document). The program sends the user’s data (encrypted) to our server which then populates the documents. They are then vetted by a human before being e-mailed or posted.
Delia: What about the competition from other companies?
Mark: There are a number of web operations that have appeared over the last 12-18 months. They are at the lower end of the market and merely provide blank forms with a guide for about £40. The user does not get any telephone or e-mail assistance with these packages and we have not found them to be a threat as our packages come with full support and we have a good track record and reputation. Sometimes it is not always about price but what you get for your money and trust has to be earned over time, which I think we can say we have from our clients, judging from the referrals we receive.
Delia: In particular, what about Desktop Lawyer?
Mark: Since they went into and out of administration, their consumer presence in the UK has not been as obvious as it once was and we do not see them as a competitor at this stage although we are aware of their moves into the corporate market in advance of any deregulation.
Delia: How do you know when you sell a package that it is actually used?
Mark: We only can tell that the documents have been delivered to the user. We cannot tell they have been used but I cannot imagine our average demographic user buying something and then if it is not used being too shy to ask for a refund.
Delia: What are the problems with the lawyer-free divorce process and how are you approaching the problems?
Mark: As long as the client is aware that finances and children are separate to the actual divorce itself and that they should seek advice regarding those issues in conjunction with our service then there are no major problems. All our petitions are vetted and if we feel that the client has insufficient grounds then we inform them and advise them as to the appropriate ground and common instances. We can also refer them to local Solicitors for assistance or we have a number of telephone based advice products they can use.
Delia: I think you have just stuck to divorce, i.e. not branched out to anything else. Is it better to have a narrow focus?
Mark: We feel that you are best sticking to what you do best and where your experience lies. We have been particularly adept at building brand awareness over the last 3 years of trading and this has paid off for us. We have built excellent relationships with the media which keeps our brand in the public eye whenever they need articles or features and we have invested heavily in cost effective marketing on and offline.
Who knows what deregulation will bring, we have new ideas and promised investment to assist us bring those plans to life once we know the landscape we will need to work in.
Mark Keenan, email mark.keenan@divorce-online.co.uk.
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