7 ms·

There actually is a lot of legal-industry-specific technology out there that most people have never heard of. It works well enough for what most lawyers and fir

by yannyu 9y ago

There actually is a lot of legal-industry-specific technology out there that most people have never heard of. It works well enough for what most lawyers and firms want, but it seems to have hit a local maxima for one major reason: nearly all the software and tools are written around Microsoft Word and the Office suite. Anyone wanting to disrupt the legal industry (in the US) is going to have to deal with MS Word in one way or another. There are hundreds of thousands of attorneys who have worked with nothing but Word and Word-related tools for decades, so someone entering the space will likely need to build project management, collaboration, and communication systems around the Word ecosystem. That or build a product so compelling and easy to migrate to that people are willing to walk away from Word.

PatentTroll 9y ago
I'm actually working on this! Would love to hear your thougts
- yannyu 9y ago
  I worked on this for a while as well! I talked with a lot of people who deal with contracts regularly (both lawyers and laypeople, in-house and in private practice) and all of them acknowledge there are inefficiencies in the way they work. The desire for better tools exists out there, it's just a matter of figuring out the best way to deliver it. The existence of the MS Word shackles means that an incremental solution is inherently limited by being compatible with the MS Word format, one way or another. Even if you convince one client to move to your solution, everyone else they interface with will still be using MS word, so you must take that into account. Import/export features can smooth the way, but will hold you back on the kinds of features you'll be able to develop. Building an entire suite that delivers a new, improved workflow is more tempting for the client, but then you're building a lot more up-front and limiting yourself to clients that actually have significant legal-related costs to defray. And again, it's still likely that your client will continue to work with people who won't be using their new tool, so will have to resort to MS Word on occasion. And to top all that off, there are a LOT of people that need to be able to use this tool. It has to be built for lawyers, sales people, procurement people, VPs, CEOs, paralegals, customer success, consultants, among others. And even if you're only talking about contracts, even contracts vary widely in length, complexity, and importance. All in all, it's a really interesting space, and I really enjoyed working on the problems there. Someone is definitely going to crack it within the next few years. Would be glad to talk more over email.
r00fus 9y ago
I think the "track changes" in Word is the killer feature that's used - if that could be replaced and the editor can read/write .docx you could pitch a wholesale replacement of MS Office.
- yannyu 9y ago
  If that's all it were, then someone would have repackaged Google Docs and sold that to the legal world. While "track changes" is absolutely essential to any product that aims to replace MS Word for legal docs, a replacement will need to have much more than that.

by yannyu 9y ago

PatentTroll 9y ago

I'm actually working on this! Would love to hear your thougts

yannyu 9y ago
I worked on this for a while as well! I talked with a lot of people who deal with contracts regularly (both lawyers and laypeople, in-house and in private practice) and all of them acknowledge there are inefficiencies in the way they work. The desire for better tools exists out there, it's just a matter of figuring out the best way to deliver it. The existence of the MS Word shackles means that an incremental solution is inherently limited by being compatible with the MS Word format, one way or another. Even if you convince one client to move to your solution, everyone else they interface with will still be using MS word, so you must take that into account. Import/export features can smooth the way, but will hold you back on the kinds of features you'll be able to develop. Building an entire suite that delivers a new, improved workflow is more tempting for the client, but then you're building a lot more up-front and limiting yourself to clients that actually have significant legal-related costs to defray. And again, it's still likely that your client will continue to work with people who won't be using their new tool, so will have to resort to MS Word on occasion. And to top all that off, there are a LOT of people that need to be able to use this tool. It has to be built for lawyers, sales people, procurement people, VPs, CEOs, paralegals, customer success, consultants, among others. And even if you're only talking about contracts, even contracts vary widely in length, complexity, and importance. All in all, it's a really interesting space, and I really enjoyed working on the problems there. Someone is definitely going to crack it within the next few years. Would be glad to talk more over email.

r00fus 9y ago

I think the "track changes" in Word is the killer feature that's used - if that could be replaced and the editor can read/write .docx you could pitch a wholesale replacement of MS Office.

yannyu 9y ago
If that's all it were, then someone would have repackaged Google Docs and sold that to the legal world. While "track changes" is absolutely essential to any product that aims to replace MS Word for legal docs, a replacement will need to have much more than that.