Rocket Lawyer vs LegalZoom: An In-depth Comparison

An Overview of Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom

While the majority of documents are still created by attorneys, sites like LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer have emerged that offer a new way of delivering these services to consumers. These sites claim to offer an easy way for consumers to create legal documents, get legal advice for their issues, and ensure that they are legally protected and informed. LegalZoom opened in 2001 while Rocket Lawyer opened in 2008. LegalZoom offers affordable services for small businesses and everyday consumers. Headquartered in Los Angeles , Rocket Lawyer focuses on providing online services to individuals and small businesses. According to their official website, LegalZoom is not a law firm, or lawyer, and does not provide legal advice. Both of these websites claim to assist in developing an understanding of individual situations and provide guidance and recommendations on what to do next.

Pricing Review

When it comes to price, Rocket Lawyer is the clear winner. It’s the only legal service we’ve seen that makes getting your documents 100% free, which is not only is well worth the $39.95 monthly fee, but it now allows you to get your documents on a pay-per-use basis even if you’re not interested in subscribing to their monthly membership program, which means you’ll never have to pay for an unnecessary legal document again. LegalZoom charges a flat fee to prepare a legal document, and when we say ‘flat fee,’ we mean it. You could be charged exactly the same amount to have your premarital agreement drafted as someone who was getting their last will and testament written up. The company has no pay-per-use services or subscription services. You pay per legal document and that’s that. If you need several legal documents, this can add up quickly.

Offered Document Services

Both Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom enable you to draft your own legal documents using pre-made templates. The websites feature online programs for drafting, editing, and revising documents according to user-provided information and answers to questionnaires. Each site has a wide range of templates available to use or purchase, covering more than one hundred topics and areas of the law.
For Rocket Lawyer, there are many forms and documents to create from the following categories: For a LegalZoom account, users can create or purchase a variety of different documents including the following: Each website claims to allow modifications to the templates to meet the user’s specific needs. However, both Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom require you to commit to a monthly or annual fee to access the forms. A LegalZoom subscription costs either $11.99 per month or $7.99 per month if paid annually at the time of purchase, while Rocket Lawyer’s basic subscription cost is $25 per month or $16.17 when it is billed each quarter. The templates purchased individually on LegalZoom cost between $39 and $89, while the templates on Rocket Lawyer can be purchased for as low as $39.95 (but can be free if you are a paying member).

Accessibility and Support

When it comes to customer support and accessibility, both Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom attempt to provide multiple touch points to meet the needs of their customers, though they do so in different ways. Customer support on LegalZoom is fairly easy to access from all over the website, with a bright red "Live Chat Support" tab that stays tucked into the bottom-right corner of every page. The chat is available between 5 a.m. and 12 a.m. Pacific time seven days a week. If you’d rather not chat, LegalZoom provides robust email and phone support as well as a support ticket system.
Rocket Lawyer, on the other hand, has no live chat support. Instead, it simply offers email support through its online "Help Center." While this Help Center is available to anyone, even those that do not have an account, it does appear to be the only available option for customer support.

Legal Guidance and Assistance Options

Legal advice and assistance is an area where LegalZoom really shines compared to Rocket Lawyer. They have a significantly higher level of service and selection.
Both services offer an advice hotline where you can have a discussion with a lawyer. Rocket Lawyer allows you to get a 30 minute call with a lawyer for $49, while LegalZoom offers unlimited attorneys. There is a small caveat — the legal advice doesn’t include things like litigation, but the service is still a great value.
In addition to the attorneys, you also get online legal advice once a year from a contract specialist, which adds a good level of value.
One main place where LegalZoom has a huge advantage over Rocket Lawyer is the referral to other specialists. LegalZoom offers support for finding family lawyers, criminal defense attorneys, intellectual property lawyers, tax lawyers and immigration lawyers . I am sure that there are other lawyer specialties that LegalZoom covers that Rocket Lawyer does not, but those are the main areas that I found. Rocket Lawyer though does refer out some specialists such as tax and real estate lawyers through its partnership with the Avvo Lawyer Directory.
There is also ongoing legal support offered by both LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, although there are some limitations. Rocket Lawyer’s ongoing support is available for one year, which is the length of their subscription service, but LegalZoom offers ongoing support for life. The one-year service though seems more than fair for a subscription fee anyways.
These services along with the advice hotline and the contract specialist support should make it easy to find the right lawyer for any situation.

Usability and Interface

When it comes to ease of use, LegalZoom has been around longer and has a more polished look to it. The site is cleaner and easier to navigate than Rocket Lawyer. With that said, Rocket Lawyer is not overly difficult to navigate. The only complaint would be that there can be a lot of scrolling on some pages. That problem is exacerbated by the plethora of advertisements on the site, which can get in the way at times. As far as design, LegalZoom has a more modern feel to it with cleaner lines. Rocket Lawyer, however, has gotten rid of a lot of advertisements and the layout is less cluttered than it was just a few years ago.
Both sites have a solid help section built into the sites, and there are easy links to customer support. Both sites provide telephone support, and both are at least fairly responsive.

Advantages and Disadvantages

It’s important to note at this point that both sites have contracts that are either LL.M. or Ph.D. drafted. That means they’re more than just legal boilerplate but less than what a contract might look like if it was drafted by one of the best in the business. That’s great news though because, they both tell you who drafted the contract and review it to make sure the contract is appropriate for your situation.
That means LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer are not the same thing as hiring a lawyer, but they are much better than form contracts you may find on other sites.
Now let’s get into the real pros and cons of both of these sites. The biggest pro of both is that you get a lot of the same documents drafted by leading lawyers for a fraction of the price.
The cons of Rocket Lawyer are:

• You need to sign up for monthly legal plan to create the contract you want.
• Once you cancel your plan, you can’t continue to access the contract you created with the legal plan unless you reactivate and pay again.
• Any contracts that you sign and send out are only active for one month before you have to reactivate your legal plan.
• You don’t necessarily have the rights to use any contracts that you download for your business purpose without having to pay for access.
• Compared to LegalZoom, Rocket Lawyer isn’t very economical for those who only need one contract but a lot more economical for those that may wish to use many contracts over the year.

The cons of LegalZoom are:

• The contract you’ll create is subject to their terms, which if you don’t review you’re subject to.
• LegalZoom won’t email you when your contract is nearly expired and will make no attempt to tell you how to renew it; paying LegalZoom will automatically renew your legal plan.
• You may need to pay for an upgraded plan to get the contract you want.
• LegalZoom only offers full access to all of their contracts if you upgrade.

Overall, Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom have great pros and cons that we previously mentioned but there is little that separates them from a cost perspective. If you’re ready to sign up for a legal plan, it’s literally half the price of hiring a lawyer but only about a third of the price of hiring a lawyer for a complex contract or business document.

The Final Decision: Which is the Superior Choice?

In terms of selecting a provider, both of these platforms have proven to have a positive experience as far as the overall consumer review. That said, there are some differences in experience, which will likely figure into what a user feels is their ultimate "user experience".
Both companies have their education and knowledge centers with some of the most comprehensive information on Legal topics on the internet. LegalZoom provides a slight advantage with their "Ask a Lawyer" service and the ability to actually speak to an Attorney about a closed form, answer questions about a document , or to get specific legal advice.
RocketLawyer has an entire "Business" section with growing legal content to help provide end to end business solutions. This section offers users information about starting and running a successful business all the way from choosing what type of business entity to form, through filing taxes, hiring employees, and everything in between.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both platforms, but if you are looking to form a company, need business documents or to communicate with lawyers, there is no clear winner. Both of them have slightly different focuses and as such "better" aimed at certain customers.