Meet Trey Ross, M.Ed., Esq. | Attorney & Legal Tech Entrepreneur

We had the good fortune of connecting with Trey Ross, M.Ed., Esq. and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Trey, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
I guess the first thought I had was: “Why not me?” For a while, I had been writing a blog called BrighterLine where we answered legal questions. The blog itself was beneficial to people who had nuanced legal questions. It was the type of blog that would occasionally get cited by grad students and law students and I would sometimes find that I popped up in a citation on GoogleScholar. In those instances, it was great to know that people were actually relying on the research we published.

However, I wanted to make BrighterLine.org an even more valuable service. So, in the Fall of 2020, I decided that BrighterLine.org should be more than a place to have legal questions answered; we would become a place to have needs met.

For example, my initial goal was to simply help people create contracts. I saw that this type of service was being provided by companies like LexisNexis, RocketLawyer, and LegalZoom and thought: “Well, if these guys are promoting these services to people here in Georgia, why can’t us Georgia lawyers make something even better for Georgians?”

So, that started the process of me working with software developers and launching my own legal tech company, PeachtreeESQ.com—a tech company powered by local lawyers who basically automate the process of creating legal documents like contracts, wills, trusts, and prenuptial agreements.

And as for BrighterLine, it’s now “The Brightline Pages” on PeachtreeESQ’s site and we’ve made it even more relevant. For example, we converted our previously esoteric “legal questions” format (which grad students found helpful) to one which seeks to aid a larger audiences. So now, we spotlight a local business owner or social media influencer and answer a legal question which the person’s followers may find interesting. In the first quarter of the year, we spotlighted Georgia photographer, Angie Webb, and an internationally known illustrator based in Georgia, Marcus Williams. And we haven’t stopped: We recently published an article which focused on questions posed by an Atlanta DJ and our next one will spotlight a dentist serving metro Atlanta.

So, PeachtreeESQ is continuing to serve my interest in legal research and also serving my nerdy engineering interests by making us head-to-head competitors with large legal tech companies like LegalZoom.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
I get really excited about all the ways coding can be used to solve problems and automate what we do as lawyers. For example, with PeachtreeESQ, I’m looking forward to making our company even more useful to people here in Georgia by increasing the number of forms which users can customize.

At the start of the year, our goal was to have 100 legal documents available for user-customization by August 2022. Well, we landed a little shy of the that number but we’ve put together a lot of legal documents in our first year. By year five, we’re aiming for 1,000 documents and we’ll be branching into areas like immigration law, intellectual property, and even county-specific forms and services.

Also, what sets us apart from others is the fact that we are real lawyers who are on the ground right here in Georgia. We represent real people and real local businesses at trials and hearings in counties throughout the Atlanta metro. Moreover, at those legal proceedings, we’re often advocating contract interpretation, Uniform Commercial Code principles, and contract defenses. For that reason, if you’re in Georgia, we know why certain terms should be used in your contract because we litigate contract disputes in Georgia all the time.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
The first place I’d take them would be for a ride through Midtown and Downtown Atlanta. Even if all they do is see Midtown from I-75/I-85, they’d get a good idea about how massive this place is and better understand what all the hype is about.

Afterwards, I’d definitely make sure they got a chance to checkout the historic spots like The King Center and Ebenezer Baptist Church. From there, I’d take them to see the colleges via a drive through Georgia Tech and head over to Morehouse, Clark Atlanta, Spelman, and Morris Brown.

Afterwards, I’d probably take them to the north side and checkout Alpharetta and Buckhead. We’d probably grab lunch somewhere in Alpharetta and do some shopping at Phipps in Buckhead.

If they’re not too beat, we’d probably spend the next few days in the suburbs hitting the basketball court at L.A. Fitness, the pool at the YMCA, and finding things to do locally which don’t require any contact with I-285.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I’d like to give a shoutout to my friend Afshin Pishevar; an attorney who–along with his brother, Shervin Pishevar–is literally changing the world with tech.

Website: www.PeachtreeESQ.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PeachtreeESQ/

Other: Email: trey@treyrosslaw.com Phone: 678-362-7576