Confido Legal: Embedded Finance for Legal
In industries like retail, software developers have great tools to embed payments into their applications. These engineers create powerful, seamless payments experiences for consumers and the businesses from which they buy. But things aren’t quite so seamless for law firms. Law firms have specific financial needs:
- Multiple bank accounts
- High dollar transactions
- A variety of payment methods; and
- Strict rules of professional conduct that govern how money is handled
These idiosyncrasies prevent legal technology engineers from using best-in-class embedded payments tools. That’s where we come in.
We are first and foremost an integration tool. Using our sophisticated GraphQL API, legal tech developers can build financial technology solutions into their applications without spending millions of dollars retrofitting industry-generic platforms. We help legal tech developers get their embedded payments and money movement features to market quickly and efficiently, while empowering them to own the law firm and end client experience. We power integrated payments offerings for many top case and practice management systems.
Beyond the technology, we also focus on helping our partners with integrated payments and finance adoption. Unlike other industries where online payments are the norm, adoption of online payments and financial tools is a major challenge for legal tech product managers, because much of the legal industry still prefers offline channels. With our combined decades of experience selling payments and tech-enabled financial services to law firms and other businesses, we not only help our integrated legal tech partners quickly build amazing, compliant solutions, we also help these partners ensure their law firm customers adopt these solutions.
Rebranding to Confido Legal
Founded in 2019, Gravity Legal was born as a division of Seattle-based Gravity Payments. We grew our brand, client base, and technology for three years under this structure, helping hundreds of law firms and managing hundreds of millions of dollars in payments. Gravity Payments was a great home for us, and we’re grateful for their support.
Today, we’re excited to announce that earlier this year, Confido Legal spun out of Gravity Payments to operate as an independent entity. Gravity Payments will continue as a shareholder. The remaining ownership is composed of company executives and private investors. In addition to the spin out, today we are proud to officially change our name to Confido Legal. The team here is thrilled about this direction, which allows us to stay laser focused on our mission in the legal market.
The Future
Looking forward, we are focused on being the one-stop shop with the best software developer experience for legal tech firms seeking to embed financial services into their applications. We see a future in which law firms do everything they used to do at their bank or third-party payment processor directly in their case management systems. As with payments, forward-thinking legal tech companies will face significant challenges bringing best-in-class embedded financial services tools to legal. They’ll be forced to create partnerships with many different financial technology companies, retrofit different platforms for the legal industry, put their firms through different underwriting processes and build to a wide variety of APIs. Our legal tech partners will continue to need only one API, one financial underwriting process, and most importantly, one partner. Confido Legal is already accelerating the pace of financial innovation in legal.
Why does all this matter? By adding financial flexibility and removing friction at the point where lawyers and clients transact, we can help expand the pool of people who will get access to the system and increase the addressable market for law firms. The world where a massive retainer paid in full by check is the only way to get legal advice needs to go away. In its place we want to create a world where a lawyer never has to turn away a client because that client can’t pay. We’ve already made an impact, and this is just the beginning. We at Confido Legal are excited to be a part of the next generation of legal services.
Acknowledgements
Most importantly, we want to thank our law firm clients, especially those who took a chance on us early in our journey. Without your support, product feedback and referrals, we simply would not exist.
We want to thank our legal tech partners who chose to build on our platform. You have helped shape our business and integration tools in countless ways. We are so excited to see what you build next and to support you on your respective journeys.
Thank you to the law firm accounting community for providing both pointed feedback and support over the years. You have helped us build our product responsibly, always making sure every dollar is accounted for.
Finally, a big shout out to Gravity Payments and our advisors and mentors. Your guidance and advice helped move us in directions we never could have anticipated. We are grateful for the opportunity to continue to learn from you.
