Derek Bluford got to speak at Stanford Law School because he built something impressive. QuickLegal connected people who needed legal help with attorneys who could help them, using a mobile platform at a time when that wasn’t common. The kind of startup that gets you invited to panels on the future of legal technology. The kind of story that Sacramento likes to tell about itself.
Bluford is back in the city and building again. He’s working at a law firm now, studying for his JD and MBA simultaneously, running a nonprofit called A Better Tomorrow Community, and drawing up plans for something Sacramento’s legal market genuinely doesn’t have: a coworking space built specifically for attorneys.
He also published a book, The Mighty Have Fallen, available on Amazon.
The First Chapter
Bluford grew up with an interest in how systems work, specifically legal systems. QuickLegal was the practical expression of that interest. The platform made legal services more accessible, which is an actual problem in California, where millions of people need legal help and can’t afford it or don’t know how to find it.
The company got attention. Stanford Law noticed. Bluford ended up on a panel about the future of law firm innovation, sitting alongside people who had spent decades in the field.
A Better Tomorrow Community
The nonprofit operates at abtcommunity.com. Its focus is reentry: helping people who’ve been through the criminal justice system find their footing when they get out. Jobs, resources, community, accountability. The things that make the difference between someone who moves forward and someone who doesn’t.
Bluford started it because he saw up close how much people coming out of the system need that simply isn’t being provided.
The reentry space in California is underfunded and under-organized. Sacramento has more need than most cities because California routes a significant portion of its prison population through Northern California facilities, and a lot of those people end up trying to rebuild their lives in Sacramento or nearby. The resources available to them vary enormously.
What ABT offers is more personal than most government-funded programs. Bluford isn’t running a bureaucracy. He’s running something that operates like a community, because he believes that’s what actually changes outcomes.
Law School, MBA, and a Full-Time Job
He’s doing all of this while studying.
Bluford is currently pursuing his law degree and MBA simultaneously. He also works full-time in operations and finance at a law firm. That’s three significant commitments running at once, which is not a schedule most people would choose.
He’s choosing it deliberately. The law degree gives him credentials that translate directly into the work he’s doing with ABT and into the next project he’s planning. The MBA gives him the business framework he needs to build the coworking space. The job at the law firm gives him proximity to the industry he’s trying to serve.
The combination is deliberate. Each piece feeds into the others, and Bluford is moving fast on all three at once.
The Coworking Space
This is the project that Sacramento’s legal community should be paying attention to.
Bluford is planning a coworking space designed specifically for attorneys. Shared paralegals. Deposition rooms. Reception services. Conference space. Everything a solo practitioner or small firm needs to operate professionally without the overhead of a full office.
Think of it as the WeWork model applied to legal practice. The economics make sense. There are thousands of solo attorneys in California who operate out of their homes or shared general-purpose coworking spaces that weren’t designed for legal work. Confidentiality requirements, client-facing needs, and the physical demands of depositions and document review all push attorneys toward dedicated space. But dedicated space is expensive, especially in Sacramento’s commercial market.
A legal-specific coworking space addresses all of that. Shared costs. Professional environment. Built-in community with other practitioners.
Bluford has the background to pull it off. He built a tech company. He understands the legal market from both the client side and, now, the practitioner side. He’s spent years thinking about how legal services actually work and where they break down.
The project is still in planning. But it’s concrete planning, not vague intention.
Sacramento’s Second Act
Sacramento has a reputation for being the place where people start over. State government draws people in. The cost of living, relative to the Bay Area, draws people in. And increasingly, the reentry community is starting to organize around the idea that the city can become a model for how California handles second chances.
Bluford fits that story precisely.
He built a legal tech company that got him to Stanford Law. He’s now building a reentry nonprofit that he believes can actually change outcomes for people the system usually discards. And he’s designing a workspace that could reshape how solo practitioners operate in this city.
QuickLegal was the first attempt. ABT Community is the second. The coworking space is the third. Each one addresses something the legal market in California gets wrong.
His book is available on Amazon: amazon.com/Derek-Bluford/e/B08NXTPJXT. His nonprofit is at abtcommunity.com. His profile is at biography.wiki/wiki/Derek_Bluford.
Sacramento has seen a lot of comeback stories. This one is still being written.