About Us
Our mission is to bring financial inclusion to the legal system to fill the Access to Justice Gap.
Our purpose is to build the legal industry's first Legal Fee Loan products that change the lives of legal consumers and business owners who, until now, could not find financing options to secure legal representation when facing legal emergencies or critical legal matters.
Our strategy is to reinvent the outdated lawyer procurement and payment experience and drive the legal industry's adoption of financial technology, digital lending, real-time invoicing, real-time payments, and instant fee financing at the point of service.
Our Story
We understand over 150 million middle-class Americans live paycheck to paycheck making too much income to qualify for legal aid but still can't afford legal services. The legal system works well for the rich but remains inaccessible to most people. LawFi is working to fill this gap for the people in the middle.
LawFi aims to ensure everyone can access the legal system through affordable and accessible legal services, regardless of their situation or net worth.
LawFi was born out of this burning desire to make the legal system more financially inclusive, fair, and accessible for all.
Our founder's own personal experiences drove this desire. He grew up in a hardworking lower-middle-income family. He watched his parents struggle to keep the lights on and food on the table. He barely made ends meet while putting himself through school and raising a son he had when he was young. He consistently fought the credit bureaus to maintain and improve his credit score.
Our founder's business experience and personal legal matter experiences include numerous civil and complex litigation cases and transactional matters. He has been both the Plaintiff or Defendant in legal actions. He was not able to sue large out-of-state vendors who owed him money in collection actions because he couldn't afford the cost of legal representation. He faced a constant threat of lawyers withdrawing from cases if he couldn't afford to pay a large invoice or the costs to defend or prosecute his case. He couldn't afford representation in his divorce or child custody matters or foreclosures and was often at the mercy of the court. In some instances, he could not afford the required retainer to secure legal representation to protect his rights or interests.
In business-related, corporate, intellectual property, employment, real estate, regulatory, and administrative law areas, he could not pursue certain contracts, partnerships, merger transactions, and other opportunities because he couldn't afford the related legal fees and costs.
His professional experience serving as a trusted law firm merger consultant for over 30 years placed him in the unique position to fully understand the pain points of both lawyers and their legal clients.
Our founder commented: "LawFi is the solution I always wanted to build to solve these problems."
Meet The Team
LawFi 's highly experienced leadership team comprises a carefully selected group of outstanding founders and entrepreneurs with extensive backgrounds in legal industry consulting, operations, and human resources; Point of Sale ("POS") and Buy-Now-Pay-Later ("BNPL") digital lending; fintech; banking; credit; financial and lending compliance; real-time payments; capital markets; credit risk; data science; AI/ML; network and cloud engineering; software development; and marketing. LawFi's team is supported by an outstanding legal team at Morrison Foerster and expert fintech lending advisors. The entire LawFi team shares a vision and passion for bringing financial inclusion to the legal system and making it more accessible to all.
Steven Highfill, CPC
Founder & CEO
Steven founded LawFi out of his burning desire to make the legal system more financially inclusive, fair, and accessible for all. His professional experience serving as a trusted law firm consultant for over 30 years placed him in the unique position to fully understand the pain points of both lawyers and their clients. Steven is a visionary technologies integrator creating innovative ways to deliver and access legal services that disrupt the status quo. He is inventing an entirely new class of loan assets called “Legal Fee Loans” and is building the first-of-its-kind Legal Fee Financing platform. He is integrating the best open finance, banking, credit, employment, and lending technologies with more inclusive and unique data sources to underwrite and create the world’s first consumer and business legal fee loans and a proprietary legal fee credit decision engine.
As an expert recruiter, he is building a strong and experienced team to launch LawFi across America. He thoroughly understands the legal industry, law firm structure, operations, and hierarchy. He understands the self-governing bar association rules and structure across all jurisdictions. He is a former Stockbroker and Investment Banker with the knowledge and skill to properly structure LawFi and raise needed capital. He is an experienced and successful platform builder having leveraged an artificial intelligent deep web search crawler to create the largest online aggregation of legal job content until its technology was purchased by Monster.com. He is very passionate about combining cutting-edge technologies with innovative, smart, and motivated development and operational teams, management, and stakeholder groups. Steven is setting the vision and strategy for the development of LawFi and its rollout in all 50 states. Steven holds a Certificate in FinTech from Harvard University and a CPC designation.
Mark Debacker
Fractional CFO & Advisor
Mark is an established leader of Fintech-powered specialty finance companies in consumer and commercial verticals, spanning startups to banks and large international financial firms. Mark is a New York State CPA who started his career as a Manager at Deloitte. He transitioned in-house to serve as CFO of several healthcare organizations before becoming the SVP and CFO of two banks. In 2009, Mark founded his own financial services lending company as the Chairman & CEO of Blue Bridge Financial, LLC. He oversaw the company from start-up through $70MM annual revenue and A to C round capital and debt raises. He successfully sold his interests in the company after ten years. He has been consulting since 2019. Mark graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with his BS in Business Administration-Accounting/Economics.
Barry Rafferty
Fractional Head of Capital Markets & Advisor
Barry is currently the Head of Capital Markets at Freedom Financial Asset Management, the sole holding company of the Freedom Financial Network. He is also the former Head of Capital Markets at Upstart and OneMain. He is an experienced Capital Market Head with a demonstrated history of scaling asset management strategies, loan originators, and selling large legacy businesses in consumer finance. He is skilled in credit portfolio management, securitization, conduits, treasury, and fixed income. Barry is a University of Pittsburgh postgraduate in mathematical finance and holds his Master’s in Economics and a B.S. in financial mathematics from the University at Buffalo.
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Tom Bruce
Fractional Chief Credit Officer & Advisor
Tom is the former VP of Credit Bank Strategy at Affirm, and the former Chief Credit Officer of First Electronic Bank. Tom has extensive experience and expertise in developing and implementing credit policies, models, decision engines, and underwriting criteria. He has overseen risk management and risk-based pricing of loan products and managed loan portfolios for a market-leading POS fintech lender, a bank with multiple fintech lending partners, and GE Capital Corporation. He holds a Master of Business Administration in Accounting from Devry University and a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration from California State University-Fullerton.
Werner Kruger
Fractional Chief Technology Officer & Advisor
Werner is a Founder and former Chief Data Officer of Bloom, London’s premiere digital e-commerce and recurring revenue lender to SMBs, the former VP of Data Science for Klarna, one of the oldest and largest Buy-Now-Pay-Later (BNPL) companies in the world, former VP of Data Science and CCO of Monese, one of the UK’s first digital bank account providers, and the former Head of Data Science for the 159-year-old Standard Bank Group, Johannesburg, serving 20 countries in Africa. Werner is a technologist who loves to solve business problems and lead teams to
do the same. Werner holds a Master of Science in WebScience & Big Data from the University of Liverpool and a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Pretoria/Universiteit van Pretoria in South Africa.
Rick Bachman, MBA, CRCM
Fractional Chief Compliance Officer & Advisor
Rick has helped some of the best-known Fintech firms and challenger banks establish their compliance programs. He works with clients and their partner banks to build the controls and compliance culture necessary for continued success. His clients include household names such as Chime, Mercury, Brex, GoodMoney, One, Gusto, Orum, Point, and many others. At last count, over 100 firms have trusted Rick to set them in the right direction with their programs.
Randy Bachman, MBA
Fractional Chief Marketing Officer & Advisor
Randy is a seasoned marketing executive and the former Global Chief Marketing Officer of Principal Financial. He is a versatile C-level marketing executive with years of experience crafting global marketing, branding and product initiatives. He is also a board member of a credit union.
Qaiser Imtiaz
Chief Architect
Qaiser is a Senior IT Architect specializing in medium to large-scale Solution Architecture and Design, Development, Support, and Maintenance of Enterprise Application projects. He has diverse experience across multiple multinational organizations. Qaiser has in-depth knowledge and experience across Integration environments. He has strong DevOps experience. His achievements span 18+ years in Information Technology working in integration, IaaS, PaaS, web services, and middleware. He is an expert in Integration /API Solutions Architecture and has been called upon to integrate complex middleware systems with propriety applications, using message queues and API with the middleware and web applications. He has excellent experience managing large to medium teams. He has demonstratable experience with technologies like RESTful, SOAP, and OAuth (Okta / Auth0). Hands-on experience with Dell Boomi and Google Apigee base applications. Qaiser has a rich background in working with multinational clients from Australia, the United States, and the Middle-east. Qaiser holds a Master of Computer Science from the International Islamic University, Islamabad.
Faraz Rana
Fintech Advisor
Faraz is a former member of the founding team at Bread. Bread is an innovative leader in POS payments and Buy-Now-Pay-Later financing. Bread sold in a successful $500M exit to a financial institution in late 2020. As part of his six-year journey from inception to
exit, in addition to managing day-to-day corporate matters as the Chief Legal Officer, Faraz’s experience was broad, including product work, bank partnerships, debt and equity capital raising, scaling internal operations, and building and managing bank grade legal and compliance functions. Before his start-up life, he advised buyers and sellers as a Private Equity/M&A attorney at a large global law firm. Combined, he has 15 years of experience operating, building, and advising. He graduated from the University of Virginia and Cornell Law School.