5 ms·

Show HN: Stripe Atlas with a Lawyer

8 points by will_brown 11y ago

justinlaing 11y ago
You should add more information to your site. More about what exactly you'll do. Comparison to other ways people get these things done. Maybe some testimonials. You need to instill an incredible amount of trust for someone to sign up for this type of service online. I don't think your website is quite there yet. Stripe has an incredible brand that many people already trust because they are using it as the way they get paid. You have a high bar to get over to rival that type of trust as an unknown company.
- will_brown 11y ago
  I will implement testimonials and comparisons. As a lawyer the trust has always been inherent with clients, but this is also why my reputation and reach is limited geographically and Stripe Atlas can provide this as a company with instant credibility globally. It is like Oz, I have performed this exact transactions for 100's of corporate clients since 2010 and they haven't even begun, but I can't compete with their credibility. At the end of the day I could probably commoditize the service more: -Package: New DE C-Corp; Business Bank Account; Stripe Account...and promise turn around in a few days. But that is not the reality. Each client/customer is unique. Example, when all the founders are non US citizens? Forget a few days, in the most extreme cases I have seen it take months, and I think Stripe Atlas will probably focus on that founder make up. Or if one DE C-Corp needs to be qualified to do business in CA or another State and that aspect is neglected delaying opening the bank account or worse setting the stage to pierce the corporate veil. Some may want an LLC or an account with a different bank, so instead I just have clients contact me, we schedule a meeting (in-person, teleconference), the client speaks directly with the lawyer (me), and in I develop/propose a customized path with a cost budget and timeline...that's my current process. I have sent an email to someone at Stripe Atlas from the original HN thread, I have asked if I could independently provide my personalized services to a sample of the first 100 free Stripe Atlas customers. Allow Stripe Atlas to judge their customer feedback for themselves and maybe they would wish to bring me aboard.
anonbanker 11y ago
This is the first stage: lawyers are now going to the cloud for their tasks. Legal offices can now be run without a physical office. Lawyers can potentially deal with more cases. It's blue-ocean strategy that just found a way to disrupt a market; Legal assistants can be reduced (or eliminated), Eventually, the need for paralegals will disappear (or pivot, hopefully). Then even Lawyers will be eaten by software. I give it fifteen years before Judges are hearing arguments from Watson (or [hopefully free software] equivalents) more than they're hearing humans. I'm looking forward to running process on/through a judge that's software-based, myself, as even their jobs will be swallowed soon enough. Judges are pretty much compilers for legal processes. it'd be interesting to deal with a GNU one.
- hobbyjogger 11y ago
  Meh, not so fast. Here's the Stanford CS professor who runs the Stanford Center for Computers and Law[1]: "One technical problem with Computational Law, familiar to many individual with legal training, is due to the open texture of laws. Consider a municipal regulation stating "No vehicles in the park". On first blush this is fine, but it is really quite problematic. Just what constitutes a vehicle? Is a bicycle a vehicle? What about a skateboard? How about roller skates? What about a baby stroller? A horse? A repair vehicle? For that matter, what is the park? At what altitude does it end? If a helicopter hovers at 10 feet, is that a violation? What if it flies over at 100 feet? The resolution of this problem is to limit the application of Computational Law to those cases where such issues can be externalized or marginalized. We allow human users to make judgments about such open texture concepts in entering data or we avoid regulatory applications where such concepts abound. A different sort of challenge to Computational Law stems from the fact that not all legal reasoning is deductive. Edwina Rissland [Rissland et al.] notes that, "Law is not a matter of simply applying rules to facts via modus ponens"; and, when regarding the broad application of AI techniques to law, this is certainly true. The rules that apply to a real-world situation, as well as even the facts themselves, may be open to interpretation, and many legal decisions are made through case-based reasoning, bypassing explicit reasoning about laws and statutes. The general problem of open texture when interpreting rules, along with the parallel problem of running out of rules to apply when resolving terms, presents significant obstacles to implementable automated rule-based reasoning." [1] http://logic.stanford.edu/complaw/complaw.html http://logic.stanford.edu/complaw/complaw.html

8 points by will_brown 11y ago

You should add more information to your site. More about what exactly you'll do. Comparison to other ways people get these things done. Maybe some testimonials. You need to instill an incredible amount of trust for someone to sign up for this type of service online. I don't think your website is quite there yet. Stripe has an incredible brand that many people already trust because they are using it as the way they get paid. You have a high bar to get over to rival that type of trust as an unknown company.

will_brown 11y ago
I will implement testimonials and comparisons. As a lawyer the trust has always been inherent with clients, but this is also why my reputation and reach is limited geographically and Stripe Atlas can provide this as a company with instant credibility globally. It is like Oz, I have performed this exact transactions for 100's of corporate clients since 2010 and they haven't even begun, but I can't compete with their credibility. At the end of the day I could probably commoditize the service more: -Package: New DE C-Corp; Business Bank Account; Stripe Account...and promise turn around in a few days. But that is not the reality. Each client/customer is unique. Example, when all the founders are non US citizens? Forget a few days, in the most extreme cases I have seen it take months, and I think Stripe Atlas will probably focus on that founder make up. Or if one DE C-Corp needs to be qualified to do business in CA or another State and that aspect is neglected delaying opening the bank account or worse setting the stage to pierce the corporate veil. Some may want an LLC or an account with a different bank, so instead I just have clients contact me, we schedule a meeting (in-person, teleconference), the client speaks directly with the lawyer (me), and in I develop/propose a customized path with a cost budget and timeline...that's my current process. I have sent an email to someone at Stripe Atlas from the original HN thread, I have asked if I could independently provide my personalized services to a sample of the first 100 free Stripe Atlas customers. Allow Stripe Atlas to judge their customer feedback for themselves and maybe they would wish to bring me aboard.

anonbanker 11y ago

This is the first stage: lawyers are now going to the cloud for their tasks. Legal offices can now be run without a physical office. Lawyers can potentially deal with more cases. It's blue-ocean strategy that just found a way to disrupt a market; Legal assistants can be reduced (or eliminated), Eventually, the need for paralegals will disappear (or pivot, hopefully). Then even Lawyers will be eaten by software. I give it fifteen years before Judges are hearing arguments from Watson (or [hopefully free software] equivalents) more than they're hearing humans. I'm looking forward to running process on/through a judge that's software-based, myself, as even their jobs will be swallowed soon enough. Judges are pretty much compilers for legal processes. it'd be interesting to deal with a GNU one.

hobbyjogger 11y ago
Meh, not so fast. Here's the Stanford CS professor who runs the Stanford Center for Computers and Law[1]: "One technical problem with Computational Law, familiar to many individual with legal training, is due to the open texture of laws. Consider a municipal regulation stating "No vehicles in the park". On first blush this is fine, but it is really quite problematic. Just what constitutes a vehicle? Is a bicycle a vehicle? What about a skateboard? How about roller skates? What about a baby stroller? A horse? A repair vehicle? For that matter, what is the park? At what altitude does it end? If a helicopter hovers at 10 feet, is that a violation? What if it flies over at 100 feet? The resolution of this problem is to limit the application of Computational Law to those cases where such issues can be externalized or marginalized. We allow human users to make judgments about such open texture concepts in entering data or we avoid regulatory applications where such concepts abound. A different sort of challenge to Computational Law stems from the fact that not all legal reasoning is deductive. Edwina Rissland [Rissland et al.] notes that, "Law is not a matter of simply applying rules to facts via modus ponens"; and, when regarding the broad application of AI techniques to law, this is certainly true. The rules that apply to a real-world situation, as well as even the facts themselves, may be open to interpretation, and many legal decisions are made through case-based reasoning, bypassing explicit reasoning about laws and statutes. The general problem of open texture when interpreting rules, along with the parallel problem of running out of rules to apply when resolving terms, presents significant obstacles to implementable automated rule-based reasoning." [1] http://logic.stanford.edu/complaw/complaw.html http://logic.stanford.edu/complaw/complaw.html