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I've thought about this problem pretty extensively (as a lawyer and software developer). My question is who are you selling this to? If it's just attorneys, th

by dbot 11y ago

I've thought about this problem pretty extensively (as a lawyer and software developer). My question is who are you selling this to? If it's just attorneys, that's fine. But if you want courts to adopt it, you will be competing thru a procurement process. This can be death for a startup - long timelines, complicated bidding procedures, and endless requests for customizations. There's huge amounts of money to be made, but by established players who are familiar with the process, built a basic CMS, and can spend thousands of hours of dev time customizing and installing it. Often for just one jurisdiction. Rinse and repeat for the rest of the country... What I've proposed in the past is a "Wordpress for courts" - a free, open source case management system. It will be more quickly adopted by smaller courts with limited budgets. As larger court systems take notice, they will be attracted not just to the cost and better UX, but the extensibility. The country will benefit by having better, faster access to court records, case law, etc. I've considered submitting it as a non-profit to HN. And you could easily create a for-profit based on implementation and customization services.

nkw 11y ago
> (as a lawyer and software developer) Me too. >What I've proposed in the past is a "Wordpress for courts" - a free, open source case management system. It will be more quickly adopted by smaller courts with limited budgets. As larger court systems take notice, they will be attracted not just to the cost and better UX, but the extensibility. The country will benefit by having better, faster access to court records, case law, etc. This. So much this. Courts are either buying commercial systems which are incredibly expensive and suck, or building their own which turns into a huge political football and results in a product that is ... what you expect. Someone (perhaps a 501c3 or something similar) needs to build a best in class open source court/case management system. Similar to what the 18F people are doing at the federal executive branch. There is still plenty of money for contractors/companies to make implementing and maintaining the solution for the individual courts, but every court in the country from the U.S. Court of Appeals to Mayberry Municipal Court running (or developing!) a different management system is insane. Imagine if all the Courts had a common API to accept your filings or notify you of case activities?
- jedgardyson 11y ago
  Thank you for your comment. It is spot on. Like I alluded to in the comment above, this was the problem that originally captivated me about the space. I was retrieving some documents from court and had to go there in person once, and then 3mo later, to get the job done. Started reading about standards, court data practices in all 50 states and was appaled by the absence of good tools and open standards to solve exactly the problem you mentioned. I've wanted to be a public interest lawyer my whole life, but when I saw how terrible the tooling/public data infrastructure for it was I thought that if I could take a crack at solving this problem it would, for me, be a more meaningful contribution towards helping to improve the lives of the people those attorneys serve.
jedgardyson 11y ago
Thanks for the comment. As I've mentioned in other replies we have been warned about the dangers of the procurement process and read a ton about it too. The first iteration of this idea was actually to try and sell to courts to create precisely the kinds of open systems and standards that you describe here. After spending some time (more than I care to admit) talking to people who sell to government, reading about procurement, and reading through RFPs we realized that it would be a ludicrous for the two of us to try and sell to a court. So, we decided to try and work with PDs first because we saw a need and an opportunity to get to know the players in the space, become familiar with the data, and make sure that we could scratch their itches better than anyone else. Once we are able to do that we are hoping to get to a small court that will let us prove that we can provide software that creates the outcomes they care about (money saved, happy judges, happy lawyers, happy clerks, and better access to justice). Then we'll start to work with procurement. Eventually, we would love to say that we are developing an open "standard" for handling legal data, but we think that should come later, once we've been able to build something that people care about and are willing to pay for.
sandGorgon 11y ago
This is pretty cool. I can see how such a thing would be amazing for developing countries like India. I daresay you will be able to get lots of interns working for free from India. Please definitely build a prototype around this and submit it to YC.

by dbot 11y ago

nkw 11y ago

> (as a lawyer and software developer) Me too. >What I've proposed in the past is a "Wordpress for courts" - a free, open source case management system. It will be more quickly adopted by smaller courts with limited budgets. As larger court systems take notice, they will be attracted not just to the cost and better UX, but the extensibility. The country will benefit by having better, faster access to court records, case law, etc. This. So much this. Courts are either buying commercial systems which are incredibly expensive and suck, or building their own which turns into a huge political football and results in a product that is ... what you expect. Someone (perhaps a 501c3 or something similar) needs to build a best in class open source court/case management system. Similar to what the 18F people are doing at the federal executive branch. There is still plenty of money for contractors/companies to make implementing and maintaining the solution for the individual courts, but every court in the country from the U.S. Court of Appeals to Mayberry Municipal Court running (or developing!) a different management system is insane. Imagine if all the Courts had a common API to accept your filings or notify you of case activities?

jedgardyson 11y ago
Thank you for your comment. It is spot on. Like I alluded to in the comment above, this was the problem that originally captivated me about the space. I was retrieving some documents from court and had to go there in person once, and then 3mo later, to get the job done. Started reading about standards, court data practices in all 50 states and was appaled by the absence of good tools and open standards to solve exactly the problem you mentioned. I've wanted to be a public interest lawyer my whole life, but when I saw how terrible the tooling/public data infrastructure for it was I thought that if I could take a crack at solving this problem it would, for me, be a more meaningful contribution towards helping to improve the lives of the people those attorneys serve.

jedgardyson 11y ago

Thanks for the comment. As I've mentioned in other replies we have been warned about the dangers of the procurement process and read a ton about it too. The first iteration of this idea was actually to try and sell to courts to create precisely the kinds of open systems and standards that you describe here. After spending some time (more than I care to admit) talking to people who sell to government, reading about procurement, and reading through RFPs we realized that it would be a ludicrous for the two of us to try and sell to a court. So, we decided to try and work with PDs first because we saw a need and an opportunity to get to know the players in the space, become familiar with the data, and make sure that we could scratch their itches better than anyone else. Once we are able to do that we are hoping to get to a small court that will let us prove that we can provide software that creates the outcomes they care about (money saved, happy judges, happy lawyers, happy clerks, and better access to justice). Then we'll start to work with procurement. Eventually, we would love to say that we are developing an open "standard" for handling legal data, but we think that should come later, once we've been able to build something that people care about and are willing to pay for.

sandGorgon 11y ago

This is pretty cool. I can see how such a thing would be amazing for developing countries like India. I daresay you will be able to get lots of interns working for free from India. Please definitely build a prototype around this and submit it to YC.