Find A Lawyer is a newly-founded legal matching service in New Zealand, helping consumers to find the right lawyer. We hear more from founder Xabi Errotabehere about how it works, its strategy and funding, and a little-known fact about the founder.
How would you describe your company to a friend?
Find A Lawyer is a free service that takes the stress out of finding a lawyer in New Zealand. Instead of trawling through directories or making cold calls, you describe your legal situation once and matched law firms reach out to you directly. It flags useful things like which firms offer fixed fees or Legal Aid, and it covers every region in the country.
And to a techy?
Find A Lawyer is a reverse-marketplace matching platform built on Next.js with an AWS Serverless backend. The data layer covers 1,033 active NZ law firms and 9,523 lawyers across 30+ practice areas, indexed in OpenSearch.
Clients chats to an AI assistant that converts the story into a structured intake: practice area, location, situation type, etc., and the platform ranks firms by practice-area fit, geographic proximity, responsiveness signals, and service attributes (fixed fee, Legal Aid). 1,601 leads sent to firms in Year 1; 53% match rate. Firm data updates continuously with freshness signals surfaced in rankings.
When were you founded?
2025
By who?
Who are your key managers/senior execs?
Xabi Errotabehere
Who are your target clients?
There are two sides to our marketplace. Firstly, consumers, so New Zealanders facing a legal situation such as a property purchase, relationship separation, employment dispute, immigration matter, or business issue, who need to find the right firm quickly without overpaying. Secondly, law firms, which can be New Zealand practices across all regions who want qualified inbound enquiries without paying per-referral fees.
What is your plan (growth strategy)?
Near-term: deepen NZ coverage, more verified firm profiles, richer practice-area content, and a reviews layer to give clients better signal. Medium-term: expand to Australia, where the same problem exists at a larger scale. The platform is built to be market-agnostic from day one.
Key achievements?
1,033 active law firms listed covering 9,523 lawyers across 30+ practice areas; 310 Legal Aid providers on the platform; 70+ languages spoken across listed firms; 660 substantive enquiries in Year 1 with a 53% match rate (347 clients matched to a firm); 86% of accepted cases matched within 24 hours; 5.2x enquiry growth from first to peak month; 400,000 combined search impressions (Google + Bing) within 90 days. Free to clients and firms. As a reminder, NZ population is only 5M+
Have you received investment?
No, the company is bootstrapped.
Have there been any key changes in direction since you were founded?
Yes. The original concept was a traditional search-and-filter directory. We pivoted to a reverse-marketplace model where clients describe their situation and firms respond to them after early user research showed the problem wasn’t “too many results to filter” but “not knowing what to look for.” Removing the browsing burden entirely proved to be the right call.
What are the key challenges in your market?
Three main ones. First, the two-sided cold-start problem: you need firms listed before clients come, and client volume before firms see value in listing. We solved supply first by building the full firm database before opening to clients. Second, trust: legal is a high-stakes purchase and users need confidence that matched firms are legitimate and responsive. We address this with verification, freshness signals, and service transparency. Third, SEO: legal queries are dominated by large incumbents and the Law Society, so building topical authority for a new platform is a long-game effort.
Tell us something people don’t already know about the company?
The founder lives in a farm and owns three chickens.
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