New services or products that support Missouri’s legal community: Richard Lozano

Richard R. Lozano’s cell phone used to be a problem.

As a St. Louis defense attorney, he needed to be accessible to clients. Traditional SMS texting, though, allowed for late-night messages from unknown numbers; it also constituted billable labor that was cumbersome to capture and monetize. He searched the marketplace for a messaging app that could serve as both a gatekeeper and a secure filing system, but he couldn’t find one. So he created it.

With the help of his wife Kim and developers in Chicago, Lozano created the monikur app and rolled it out in August.

Here’s how it works: Giving a client a link to your monikur profile, Lozano said, is like handing out your business card, only this business card prompts your client to download an app that creates a direct texting channel through both of your cellphones — and you, the attorney, have total control over that channel.

Want to block texts before 8 a.m. and after 5 p.m., Monday through Friday? monikur lets you set “office hours” for them. This function filters out texts at odd hours sent by clients seeking emotional, not legal, support. And it won’t even allow texts to be typed outside of the designated window, so there’s no danger the clients will think their texts are being ignored.

Want to get paid for all of this texting? The app allows you to export all texts from one client within a date range, either as a PDF or as a CSV data file that is compatible with spreadsheets and billing software. If you’re an attorney who charges a rate of $300 per hour, and you use the app to bill just an extra one-tenth of an hour for texting activities, you’ll make your money back on monikur’s $20 monthly subscription.

That subscription model relieves monikur of the burden of seeking revenue by selling user data. And because the system is end-to-end encrypted, even Lozano and his developers can’t see the contents of other users’ text conversations.

So far, Lozano himself is using monikur to communicate with dozens of clients. He plans to attend several legal conferences in the next six months to tout the app’s virtues. In addition, he has arranged for a pilot program in the Missouri Public Defender System wherein 10 of its attorneys will try out the app for free and give feedback. The public defender’s administrators also will get to use a central control panel that allows them to access chats and contacts from their public defenders. Large law firms already do this with emails, Lozano pointed out.

“Texting has become a primary means of communicating, and for millennials, it’s their preferred means,” Lozano said. “So we’ve created this control panel so organizations can have control and ownership over text conversations, not just email.”

Lozano and his team are now developing two new features. One is a reminder function for both counsel and client. Its purpose is to reduce missed court dates. The other is a private-label version of monikur enabling law firms to customize their own app using monikur’s infrastructure.

In the meantime, he said, monikur has plenty to offer individual lawyers like himself.

“I’m an attorney first and foremost,” said Lozano, who earned his law degree from the University of Kansas in 1993. “I created this as a solution for myself, but there are many solo and small-firm attorneys just like me that have both benefited from cellphones and been tormented by them.”