The old saying goes, if it’s growing like a weed, it’s probably a weed. Last week’s news from the Washington Post that personal loans are growing like a weed is a stark reminder of how good times and growing paychecks often get folks out over their skis. With an average personal loan balance exceeding $16,000, these unsecured debts now rival credit card balances.

Credit cycles are…well…cyclical. Let’s hope we move back from the brink before it cycles back around.

This article from MarketWatch is an interesting discussion about the return of cashout refis in the high end real estate market. With a weakening housing market, we could quickly find ourselves in another 2007-8, though on a smaller scale. However, those that find themselves underwater or nearly so could throw a large number of high value charge-offs into the market.

This article from the Wall Street Journal details how some 33% of auto loans are now “underwater”, as the loan for one car is rolled into the purchase of another. The levels now exceed anything seen historically, even in 2008.

If there’s a turn in the credit cycle, creditors are headed into uncharted territory with the number of auto deficiencies – and their size relative to asset value – that will need to be addressed. Hopefully, the situation will improve before the cycle turns for everyone’s benefit.

We’ve just launched our revised Lawgix Inc. website, and we welcome you to take a stroll through the pages. Historically, Lawgix Inc. and our sister law firm, Lawgix Lawyers, LLC, have shared a common space. However, given the growth of both, that no longer suited our needs.

The goal of our new site is to inform and engage. First, we want to inform visitors about our vision and how our current solution, Lawgix Collections Litigation Exchange (CLX), takes us towards that vision. Additionally, we want to share How It Works. If you understand how we view the problem and our approach to solving it, everything makes more sense. Finally, we also wanted to share a bit about ourselves. Everyone spends a huge portion of their lives “at work”, but there’s no reason we can’t learn about each other, build lasting relationships, and find common ground.

The one gap in our story right now is our Customer Success pages. We have not formalized our success stories just yet; we’re simply too busy making our customers successful. However, we do plan to roll out those stories over the coming weeks and months. So, please come back and read them as they arrive.

We also hope to use the site to engage with customers and prospects. On virtually every page, we invite you to reach out to us. Per our values and culture, we want the experience with Lawgix to be personal and direct. So, we encourage you – here and on our pages – to contact us, early and often.

We look forward to your feedback, which you can send as you might expect through the forms, or just drop us a line at info@lawgixlaw.com. Thanks for your visit.

History

If you’re building a software business in the legal space, it really helps to have a strong law firm with whom to partner. And such was the dilemma at the founding of Lawgix Inc.

At Lawgix Inc., our vision is to transform legal servicing by enabling parties to collaborate with ease and efficiency on a beautiful product that ensures transparency and compliance.  To achieve that, we build software to consolidate, orchestrate, and optimize high volume, compliant legal servicing. And due to domain knowledge our founders had, we decided to initially focus on collection litigation.

However, to do that effectively, we needed a collections law firm with whom we could partner. The firm needed to be – like us – willing the “break the wheel”, or try new, bold strategies that could fundamentally alter the economics and value that our customers would receive. But trying to convince an established firm to support that effort was a bridge too far.

Thus, in addition to Lawgix Inc., a sister company was born, Lawgix Lawyers, LLC. Lawgix Lawyers, LLC – often just referred to as “LLC” around here – was made up of like-minded attorneys and staff with extensive experience in collection litigation. LLC was anxious to try a new approaches, to experiment with cost structures and business models that could make a material impact on high volume legal servicing and how customers experience it.

And it worked.

From their founding through to the future, INC and LLC are and will remain separate entities. However, their shared history and vision remains, and we hope that the combined value of that long standing partnership will continue long into the future.