Welsh legal brand to feature on The Apprentice
Former slate entrepreneur to ask Lord Sugar to invest £250,000 in Dynamo Legal
Alex Mills, a 22-year-old businessman from Cardiff and the founder of Dynamo Legal, is to appear on The Apprentice next week alongside other young hopefuls hoping to charm Lord Sugar into investing 250,000 in their businesses.
Dynamo Legal aims to persuade 245 law firms to join a collective marketing scheme, which, it is hoped, would be able to spend up to £7m on advertising.
Three local firms are understood to have paid deposits on Dynamo Legal's 720 fee for a 30-day marketing trial. All the main areas of civil law are covered, from family and property to personal injury and probate, as well as crime.
A spokesman for Dynamo Legal said Mills got a job at the age of 19 for a slate sign business, but the firm went bust six months later. Mills was involved in buying it, and turning it round until, aged 21, he sold his share of Prestige Slate to a business partner.
The spokesman went on: "We are not trying to be something like QualitySolicitors. It doesn't cost thousands of pounds to sign up and we're not asking for a total rebrand.
"What we are doing is approaching individual firms and saying 'spend some of your marketing budget with us."
In line with the ban on referral fees, the spokesman said firms would pay a single monthly fee, regardless of the number of referrals, which could be from one to one thousand.
The spokesman said the idea behind Dynamo Legal emerged when Mills was running the slate business and needed to use solicitors. The brand aims to make legal services simple, in the same way that Prestige Slate made the buying of slate signs easy.
"Solicitors rarely have to use legal services and do not understand how customers feel," the spokesman said. "Our solicitors will be local, approachable and friendly."
He added that, through The Apprentice, ten million TV viewers would find out about Dynamo Legal and want to refer cases to it.
In a statement for the BBC, Mills said: "I'm an old head on young shoulders. I believe I'm the new breed of businessman that this process requires."