Upsolve: Another Piece in the Access-to-Justice Puzzle

Legal technology as a vertical has exploded over the past couple of years. Estimates put law-related startups at more than 1,000, and the competition for funding and lawyers as customers is fierce. However, several new projects and companies are now focused on the self-service or self-help model. Access to justice is a problem for an estimated 60-80% of Americans, so any technology platform that assists consumers with legal problems is desperately needed.

Enter Upsolve, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit that launched this past June. Operating out of Blue Ridge Labs (the Robin Hood Foundation’s Social Impact Incubator), Upsolve improves consumer access to Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. I had the pleasure of interviewing Upsolve founders Rohan Pavuluri and Jonathan Petts. Check it out.

Mary: Do you have legal and/or technology backgrounds?

Rohan: I’m currently taking a leave of absence from Harvard, where I’m studying statistics and computer science. Over the last few years, I’ve had the chance to work on a couple projects with the City of Chicago’s Data Science Team and the US Digital Service. I got the idea for Upsolve while working on a Harvard Law School research team, studying legal self-help.

Jonathan: I’ve been in the bankruptcy world for eight years. After graduating law school, I clerked for a couple of bankruptcy judges and worked as a corporate bankruptcy attorney at two large firms in New York. During my time in big law, I had the chance to work on consumer bankruptcy cases pro bono. I saw the inefficiencies in the current system and wanted to build technology to make Chapter 7 cheaper and more accessible to Americans who need it. This inspired me to start Upsolve.

Mary: What problem are you solving?

Our constitution built a lifeline for Americans who fall into debt from sudden financial shocks like job loss, medical illness, or divorce. It’s called bankruptcy. The problem is that the lifeline is broken. It costs over a thousand dollars to hire lawyer, legal aid clinics can only handle a fraction of demand, and it’s virtually impossible to file on your own. So even though at least 19.2 million American households would benefit from filing for Chapter 7, last year roughly half a million did. Millions of Americans are simply priced out of the courts.

Our nonprofit believes technology can make bankruptcy simpler, faster, and cheaper. We’ve built the first online platform to guide users with routine cases through every step of the bankruptcy process. The core of the product is an online survey that uses cartoons and plain language inspired by the Financial Distress Research Project at Harvard Law School. Once a user fills out the answers, we populate the official forms that are filed with the court after pro bono attorney review.

Mary: Are you solving the same problem with the same solution as when you started the company?

We’re still trying to simplify personal bankruptcy, but we’ve iterated on the solution. We initially aimed to build a software product that debtors could use to file for bankruptcy totally on their own—without the help of a lawyer. We’ve realized that, while technology can do 90% of the work involved in a bankruptcy, humans are still really important. The challenge is making the process as lean as possible. So, now we’re focused on building technology to streamline bankruptcy, but we’re also developing ways to incorporate a service element into our model.

What's the vision for Upsolve for the next year?

We want to make sure that no one is too broke to file for bankruptcy. We’ve built our prototype software, and now we want to focus on perfecting and scaling it.

Mary: How are you funded?

We started in June with $20,000 of support from Harvard University and Yale Law School. Since then, we’ve raised $50,000 from the Robin Hood Foundation’s Catalyst grant and recently $15,000 from Princeton.

Mary: Any special challenges in the legal industry?

The legal industry is so afraid of innovation. Whenever we describe our product, we often receive questions that focus on edge cases. We filter them out. No product is for everyone. The fact that we can’t solve every bankruptcy problem isn’t a reason not to try solving any of them.  That’s especially true when you consider our national access-to-justice crisis.  Four out of five people who need a civil lawyer in this country can’t get one.  That’s not going to change without risk-taking and experimentation.

Lawyers have designed laws based on the assumption that every debtor will have a lawyer. This has had the unfortunate consequence of making it difficult for alternative models, particularly organizations building consumer-facing legal tech products, to enter the scene.

Mary: How do you approach consumers that are reluctant to use technology?

Gaining our users’ trust online has been a big challenge. When it comes to personal finance, there’s no shortage of scams facing low-income Americans. When we tell people that our service could help them erase all their credit card and medical debt, and do it for free, it seems too good to be true. We must get better at convincing our users that we’re not trying to take advantage of them. So far, we’ve made some progress by developing referral partnerships with community-based organizations in New York City. Once a trusted nonprofit tells someone to use Upsolve, they’re more likely to follow through.

Mary: How do you measure success and what is your favorite success story?

Our most important metric for success is the number of people we help file for bankruptcy. Since we started building our software a few months ago, we’ve helped 30 low-income New Yorkers get a fresh start. It’s hard to overstate the impact we’ve made on their lives. It erases constant anxiety and gives them a new sense of what’s possible. Our users have already gone on to get new jobs. As the Supreme Court stated, bankruptcy gives hard-pressed Americans “a new opportunity in life and a clear field for future effort.”

Our favorite success story comes from a woman named Linda. She was in a car accident last year and fell into $30,000 of medical debt. Linda had to take some time off from work and began missing credit card payments, which made her fall further into debt. Linda came to us because she couldn’t afford a lawyer and couldn’t get help from legal aid. We filed her bankruptcy within a week, wiping her slate clean, and now she’s working again.

Mary: Startups are an adventure; what's your favorite startup story?

Raising money for a nonprofit is hard, and only now do we realize how crazy you need to be to raise money for a nonprofit that’s also a tech startup. That’s why there are barely any tech nonprofits around.

In our effort to raise money and revise restrictive policy around legal tech, we took a bus down to Washington, DC, this summer and visited about 10 congressional offices on Capitol Hill. We found some great allies, but we were humbled by conversations with a few Congressional staffers who thought government should stop funding legal aid altogether. It reminded us that despite our legal tech niche, we needed to see ourselves as advocates for expanding access to justice.

Mary: Any advice to other legal tech entrepreneurs?

Minimize the time you spend around risk-averse lawyers. Jonathan is proud of his legal training, but it trains you to only see risk and downside, not exponential growth and upside. You are the five people you spend the most time with, so it’s important to be around other entrepreneurs with vision.  If all you focus on is what could go wrong, you’d never get started.

It’s a very exciting time for Upsolve, and I would encourage everyone to consider reaching out to nonprofit legal tech startups to talk collaboration. Trusted advisors are the way to go with newer companies, and established legal technology entrepreneurs can help. #onwards.