Legal Services Marketplace & Lawyer Directory Platform Development

Phased fixed-price. Discovery is $5-8k for 2-3 weeks and produces the architecture, provider-verification design, payments and UPL-boundary plan, and a fixed-price Build statement of work. The Build itself is typically $15-40k depending on scope — directory plus booking plus provider workspace sits in the middle of that range; adding payments, document generation, and a second language moves it up. Optional Run is $2-6k/month, month-to-month. Discovery is the only commitment to start.

A template gets you listings and a single booking slot, and you rent the platform forever. We ship the architecture behind a regulator-licensed national legal marketplace: a credential-review provider-verification flow, multi-channel booking (video / phone / in-office) with email + push confirmations, a separate provider workspace, automated legal-document generation, and indexable legal tools as an SEO moat — all in a Turborepo monorepo whose source you own. Custom wins when verification, document workflows, or a second language are core to your product rather than optional add-ons.

A focused directory-plus-booking build lands in the same 6-10 week window as our other production engagements, with a thin slice on real traffic by roughly week 6. For reference, the national bilingual legal marketplace we ship the architecture from went from kickoff to public launch in about 16 weeks — and that was the full scope: directory, booking, provider workspace, legal calculators, police directory with maps, emergency hotlines, and PDF document generation, all bilingual and regulator-compliant.

With a real verification flow, not an honor-system checkbox. Providers register, upload their credentials, get reviewed, and only then publish a verified profile — the exact pattern we built for a Ministry-of-Justice-licensed platform where unverified providers could not appear. On top of that we build the trust surface buyers expect from UpCounsel or Priori: verified badges, structured practice-area and jurisdiction data, and reviews. The verification rules (bar-number checks, disciplinary-status sources, document review) are scoped to your jurisdiction in Discovery.

Yes. We wire Stripe Connect (or your processor) for consultation fees, retainers, and escrow-style holds where the engagement model needs funds held until work is delivered. Because legal payments touch trust-accounting and unauthorized-practice-of-law boundaries, we scope exactly what the platform can hold and route in Discovery — against your state's fee-handling rules — before we build it into the booking flow. You own the integration and the Stripe account.

Both are defaults, not add-ons. The platform is bilingual-by-default on next-intl — every data model carries both locales and every route prerenders both languages, with RTL support — so a US marketplace launching English-first can add Spanish (or any second language) without a rebuild. Everything is responsive and built mobile-first; the directory, booking, and provider workspace all work on a phone, and the emergency/quick-access surfaces we build are specifically designed for fast mobile use.

It captures demand that a directory alone misses. We render free legal tools and calculators — think court-fee, deadline, and legal-interest calculators — as static, indexable pages instead of leaving them as PDFs scattered across other sites. Each tool ranks for high-intent queries, brings in people who then convert into directory searches and bookings, and compounds over time. This is a proven pattern on the platform we ship the architecture from, where these tools are a deliberate, indexable demand-capture moat rather than a footnote.

We design the platform around the boundary that the marketplace connects clients with lawyers and does not itself give legal advice — keeping you clear of unauthorized-practice-of-law exposure — and we scope advertising-rule and fee-handling constraints to your jurisdiction in Discovery. On data, the platform we built is GDPR-compliant with provider credential data handled under review-and-retention rules; we apply the same discipline to provider PII, document storage, and access controls, mapped to your privacy obligations before any data moves.

You own all of it — the monorepo source, the database schema, the document templates, and the runbooks — handed over at the end of Build with no license or platform lock-in. The build is in-house: the same team that scopes your Discovery and picks the architecture is the team that ships it. We do not hand your marketplace to an offshore body shop, because that handoff is exactly the failure mode we exist to remove.