But the experience left him thinking: where do most people turn to when they need legal help?That’s when he joined up with Leon de Costa, a barrister in criminal law, and a group of other solicitors and barristers to form Freelawyer ( www.freelawyer.co.uk), a website that aims to make English and Welsh law more transparent and more accessible to ordinary people.With £1.5m from private backers raised in just 10 days, they got to building what de Costa, CEO of Freelawyer, and Mehta, legal director, believe is the most thorough legal site in the world.People can research around 5,000 different legal questions broadly organised into six categories – family law, motoring law, personal injury law, housing law, employment law and consumer law. Virtual lawyers guide the users through a series of questions, narrowing down the nature of the problem and the course of action the user wants to take. Freelawyer then supplies legal information and offers a list of possible actions to take. Users who want to find a lawyer can put in a bid for quotes from interested lawyers. So far, the four-month-old site has generated 4,500 requests for lawyers.For critics who believe the site is just one step down that slippery slope of DIY law, de Costa and Mehta take pains to point out that Freelawyer isn’t meant to be substitute for a lawyer.

Instead, it is simply trying to give everyday people the means to make informed decisions about their legal dealings.”For example, one of the things people find most frustrating is that they have no idea how much legal fees should cost,” Mehta says. “Should they pay £300? £500? £1,000?” As a case in point, he says that a small company recently went to Freelawyer and contacted two solicitors to request an estimate for the legal costs of transferring a commercial lease to new premises. One firm came back with as estimate for £250, the other for £3,500.Aside from providing legal information, Mehta and de Costa note that Freelawyer has turned out to be somewhat of a crude social barometer of society’s anxieties. Just before Christmas, the two found that hundreds of people were logging on to find out more information on redundancy. They speculate that many of the users, who visited from large corporations, were worried about their companies tightening their belts at the end of the year.Even more interestingly, traffic to the site’s divorce pages shot up after the holidays, and had its all-time high traffic on Valentine’s Day. “I think you could chalk that up to [the fact that] men are supposed to behave a certain way on that day, and they don’t,” says de Costa with a grin.

Divorce- and work-related rights remain the most popular areas, though requests for immigration law are on the rise. Depressingly, the site’s domestic violence section gets most of its traffic from midnight until 1am, while the drunk-driving pages are at their most popular during the winter holidays.Users also write in when they can’t find the legal issue they are looking for. In January, several people wrote in to ask what the minimum lawful temperature for an office is. (For the record, it’s 16C if you’re an office worker and 13C if you’re a manual worker.)De Costa and Mehta like to call Freelawyer a second-generation dot. The site wasn’t thought up at some trendy restaurant with ideas hastily jotted down on a napkin, nor was it brainstormed by a bunch of MBAs believing they were streamlining an industry they’d never worked in. Indeed, the site – with its straight-talking content, its growing revenue streams and its steady growth in traffic – might just end up showing other internet companies how it’s done.

For a start, the tight control over money is apparent: the sign on the door is a curling photocopy of the website’s logo and, inside the office, the only bit of colour comes from a couple of copies of the Financial Times scattered about some desks.Freelawyer claims it will break even in the next three to four months. The bulk of its revenues come from lawyers who pay a flat annual fee of £500 to be listed on the site. (The law prevents Freelawyer from taking a referral fee from lawyers) It also plans to sell legal documents and legal insurance. A paid legal site for businesses, modelled on freelawyer, is also in the works. But Mehta and de Costa say they’ve still got a lot more ground to cover with Freelawyer.