As Matthew Horn, co-founder of Legal Services Link, was leaving a presentation at a legal technology conference in early 2017, he was chased down in the hotel lobby. An executive for the State Bar of Arizona had seen his presentation, loved the idea for Legal Services Link, and wanted to reach out about bringing the technology to the bar association.

About a year and a few hundred bureaucratic hangups later, they finally made that partnership a reality.

The State Bar of Arizona this month launched a “Find a Lawyer” tool using Legal Services Link's technology integrated directly into its website; the Virgin Islands Bar Association plans to do the same in a few months. The tool, featured prominently on the state bar website, takes information from users about their legal need—the type of legal work they need done, what jurisdiction it belongs in, any questions users have about the legal issue—and passes it off to attorneys who sign up to receive notifications.

Bar associations have certainly taken to partnering with technology companies to offer services to their members, but most bar groups keep their technology partners at arm's length, offering subscriptions or access without taking a particularly active role in the development or deployment of that technology. Horn decided to wade into a more involved partnership because the potential benefits to Legal Services Link were too good to pass up.

“We were really lacking what bar associations have, which is people with legal needs and attorneys,” Horn said. “Bar associations have really high web traffic because they have significant credibility. They have people searching out their websites to find a lawyer, and then on the other side they have all these lawyers looking for clients.”

The process of co-creating a platform was far from simple, however. “Dealing with state bars, particularly ones that are mandatory, you have to jump through a lot of hoops,” Horn said.

Before the Legal Services Link team could begin development, Horn had to get the idea through the state bar's technology committee, and then through a full vote of the bar association, a process that took months.

“You're talking about a lot of strong attorneys with strong opinions,” Horn noted. “A lot of people were for it, a lot of people were against it.” Some attorneys were concerned about the way the tool could infringe on local market dominance, or the referral power of county bar associations.

Bar associations across the U.S. have not exactly embraced the kind of attorney-client marketplace technology that Legal Services Link is premised on. Bar organization ethics rules against specific forms of fee splitting have forced a number of legal technology companies to either restructure or abandon their business model.

Horn spent the year working on State Bar of Arizona leaders to try to address these concerns. “We tried to work out terms so it's a win-win for everybody,” he said.

Users can post as many legal issues as they'd like for free. Attorneys can see the potential leads that are relevant to their practice areas for free; to respond, however, they need to sign up for a $300 annual subscription (but can respond to as many leads as they'd like), which keeps the service out of fee-splitting issues.

Horn hopes that the Find A Lawyer tool can help bar associations reclaim some of the attorney marketing role that has moved over to companies such as Avvo in recent years. “Our hope is that this empowers the bar associations to take the legal market back. They have the credibility, they have the members, they have everything, they're just not advancing technologically fast enough to keep up with their private competitors out there,” Horn said.