The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports…

Zeb Anderson is on a mission to make legal services available to everyone, not just those who can afford it.

A former compliance and analytics specialist at Medtronic, Anderson is the founder of LegalQ, a free smartphone app that connects people with lawyers.

Through the app, users submit details of their legal situations and why they need an attorney. They then choose a lawyer in their jurisdiction to schedule a free 15-minute consultation or choose to have one instantly, Anderson said. The consultation appointment is automatically synced to the lawyer’s calendar.

For $109, a user can pay for a one-hour consultation. If the user wants to obtain that lawyer, that agreement is done off the platform.

Users of the app can search for legal consults in areas such as criminal justice, family law, personal injury, trademark infringement, immigration, employment and labor, taxes, real estate and business. In Minnesota, the platform is processing at least 15 consultation requests each day, Anderson said.

The total addressable market of legal services in the U.S. is around $350 billion, of which 20% is spent on new client outreach and advertising, he said.

Many times, agencies supply lawyers with lists of names of people searching for legal help. Those lawyers use that information to contact people, either through phone calls, e-mails or mailers. That strategy is inefficient, Anderson said.

“It’s a terrible user experience for the user, as well as the attorneys who are fighting with 10 other [attorneys] at the same time,” Anderson said.

With the app, lawyers can choose how many clients they want referred to them, or choose how many leads they want each month.

Anderson developed the idea for LegalQ while at Medtronic, where he noticed the inefficiencies of middlemen in the medical device industry.