Sullivan Stromberg PLLC, a two-attorney law firm here whose owners describe themselves as tech junkies, says it has changed its name to Lucent Law PLLC and has launched a secure online legal services platform that it believes represents the wave of the future.

Through the proprietary e-commerce platform, which it developed and has named Forms & Essentials, the firm is offering more than 175 fixed-price services and packages in the areas of real estate, business law, wills and trusts, and family and personal matters.

Brett Sullivan and Spencer Stromberg, the firm’s two principals, say their intent is to provide small businesses and other potential clients with greater access to legal services by melding the convenience of online shopping and transparent pricing with the knowledge and advice of experienced attorneys.

“Lawyers, from time immemorial, have not made it easy to access their services. We feel there’s a better way,” Sullivan says.

Stromberg says studies have shown that a huge majority of people with legal needs don’t seek out the services of an attorney, often due to concerns about what it will cost. 

“They try to lawyer it themselves or ignore the problem,” sometimes with severe financial consequences, he says. Lucent’s approach seeks to allay such concerns and make it simple to access professional legal services online, typically without even needing to speak to an attorney, he says.

Lucent—the name is intended to connote clarity—occupies 1,600 square feet of space in the Courtyard Office Center, at 827 W. First. Other than Sullivan and Stromberg, the five-year-old firm employs a legal assistant and receptionist.

Sullivan and Stromberg say they timed the practice name change to coincide with the launch of the e-commerce site, which took more than 18 months and hundreds of hours to develop and included testing a number of different brands of project-management software. 

They credit Spokane design firm Klundt|Hosmer with helping to turn their concepts into reality and create an easy-to-navigate website and legal services platform that they’ll continue to tweak and augment as the legal services they offer there evolve and expand.

“We’re using state-of-the-art technology to improve our efficiency. We’re a cloud-based law firm. We just felt it’s going to add value to our clients,” Sullivan says.

Stromberg says the firm plans to add more services and forms on its legal services platform, including possibly videos, as it sees needs that it can address effectively online. He and Sullivan emphasize that the firm remains committed to face-to-face engagement for clients who prefer it or for matters that the Forms & Essentials platform doesn’t address.

They say their legal services platform is different from well-known form sellers such as LegalZoom and RocketLawyer in that those companies can’t provide individually tailored legal advice and documents. In fact the form sellers aren’t lawyers, so they’re legally barred from providing any form of legal advice, they say.

With Lucent Law, Stromberg says, “an attorney is involved in the process in every single thing we do.”

Stromberg received his law degree from the University of Washington in 1993 and worked at law firms here and in Seattle before joining Sullivan in forming Sullivan Stromberg in 2010. He says his upbringing and part of his early law career was in a family business that was involved in real estate development, construction, and property management, and he also was a small business owner in the restaurant and brewery industries.

He says he believes the experiences of running a business and managing construction projects and commercial property give him a unique understanding of the issues facing his clients.

Sullivan has somewhat similar private-sector experience. He is a 1994 Gonzaga University law school graduate who started practicing law here that year, and joined a large residential contractor and developer as in-house counsel and manager in 1997. He returned to private practice in downtown Spokane in 2008.

His practice is focused mostly on real estate and business law, including local transactions; restructurings and workouts; and creditor-debtor representation in receivership and bankruptcy proceedings.  

He also represents parties in litigation proceedings in the areas of contract disputes, real estate investments, guardianships, and related matters.