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We Are All Lawyers Now – The Rise of the Legalish

lixtra 8y ago
> ‘Aren’t we all in the legal field to some extent?’ I heard a CCO complaining that non-legal people should not have access to any contracts. Her claim was that they would read those contracts and think they understand them, while in fact they won't. She considered this a too great risk because only legal people could truly understand them. She'll love this piece.
- gearhart 8y ago
  If you can't understand a contract you're signing, you aren't really signing it. It's a very protective industry - you go through a lot of very expensive and time-consuming training and selection to get to be a certified lawyer, everyone in the industry has a heavily vested interest in making sure that there's a lot of valuable work that only certified lawyers can do. No wonder, then, that they're resistant to automation - if you can bill $300 an hour for braindead work you can hand off to interns and just get checked by a lawyer before it goes out, why would they want to kill that cash cow? The trouble is that quite apart from the rent-seeking cartel behaviour, it skews our entire legal system to much better serve those who can afford to pay for lawyers. Perhaps the government ought to be supporting legal automation services.
  - MrEfficiency 8y ago
    We are trying to file our non-profit. An office said they could, expecting it to take 3-4 hours, at 200$/hr. I found out this can be done for a 45$ filing fee in about 20 minutes. That nice girl on the phone was straight evil.
  - howard941 8y ago
    Resistance varies greatly depending on jurisdiction. Your terminology suggests you're not in the USA (pardon me if I'm mistaken). Over here in the states the established firms have a vested interest in automating or offshoring (or both) as much as possible, for obvious reasons. The US government should be supporting legal aid for civil matters. From watching the boob tube civil matter legal aid is a thing in old Blighty. Pity we didn't adopt that along with the common law. But w/r/t govt funding in the US it can barely finance public defenders (to which there is a right, if I read Gideon correctly) and anyway, it's every man for himself. That's the American way.
    - DanBC 8y ago
      > From watching the boob tube civil matter legal aid is a thing in old Blighty. No, absolutely not. You get legal aid if you're being prosecuted for a crime. You get legal aid if the state is trying to remove your children (but only at the point where they've served the notice and gone to court). You might get legal aid in family court (for divorce or child contact arrangements) if your spouse was abusive. You might get legal aid in court of protection. But for most civil law there is no legal aid available: you use the small claims track or you pay for lawyers.
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    Who says lawyers are resistant to automation? E-discovery is a booming market. Y-combinator just funded a startup called Klarity that reads and interprets contracts for you.
    - barrow-rider 8y ago
      Seriously. I used to run data centers on both coasts and we had easily a half a dozen eDiscovery firms and several regular law firms with big data center presences -- presumably because they're using some of those tools. Hourly billing rates of $300/hr make law a juicy target for technical disruption.
  - pydry 8y ago
    I worked with some lawyers on some legal (finance based) automation based work and they weren't overtly resistant to automation at all, but it was fairly self evident that they were used to over-complicating everything - e.g. creating legal work to counter entirely hypothetical risks or explaining really simple things in a overly complicated way. They would habitually take 5 minutes to explain something in a hard to understand way that could be explained in 30 seconds clearly with zero loss of information. It reminded me of the software engineers I've worked with who manufactured job security with dizzying levels of technical debt.
    - pnw_hazor 8y ago
      Lawyers may lose their license if their explanations to clients are not complete. Generally, I find non-lawyers are often lazy, sloppy, or indefinite when speaking or writing. When I was a software engineer I didn't notice it, now I see or hear sloppy/lazy language everywhere and it bugs the crap out of me.
    - gamblor956 8y ago
      When you're dealing with anything involving more than a few zeroes, those edge cases are the point of hiring lawyers, because those edge cases are usually what lawsuits turn on. If you don't believe edge cases matter, just ask Cleveland how it feels about losing the (original) Browns...
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >If you can't understand a contract you're signing, you aren't really signing it. The problem isn't that people don't understand things. The problem is that they think they understand them only to find out that a ton of key words they thought they understood are actually pointers to specific legal concepts (which themselves may have pointers and so on) within the niche area of law the contract covers and they are blindsided by this to their detriment when there is a disagreement over whether the terms are satisfied. This is particularly insidious (because of the preexisting power imbalance) when the legal matter is not contracts but state and local civil code and ordinance. People think they're complying with the law but they're really not and it gives the government power of arbitrary enforcement (which leads to abuse and corruption).
    - CPLX 8y ago
      Is it “insidious” when only software developers fully understand edge cases and complicated dependencies? Or is that just how software works? Isn’t software by definition just a collection of many relatively simple rules and procedures? Sometimes complicated systems are complicated. It’s true that lawyers can have a knack for overthinking things sometimes but fundamentally these concepts are difficult and people’s rights and responsibilities and obligations and agreements overlap in complicated ways that often just don’t lend themselves to anything but sophisticated analysis.
    - someguydave 8y ago
      1. Lawyers are licensed by the state to work in the interest of the public 2. They (along with lawyers like judges and legislators) create a guild with its own language which has the side-effect of empowering knowing lawyers over a reasonably literate layman 3. The public is now required to "ask a lawyer before doing anything" for "their safety"
  - SpelingBeeChamp 8y ago
    Interestingly, there are many legal settings in the United States where non-lawyers have roles roughly identical to those of attorneys. See here: https://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/20072450-RolesforNonlawyerPractitioners.pdf https://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/20072450-Rolesfor...
  - behringer 8y ago
    Many regional governments offer the paperwork you need right on their government website. In my state, you can easily sue for damages, child support, custody and many other common matters without any lawyer.
    - pnw_hazor 8y ago
      Suing is the easy part. A friend did a non-lawyer "quick and easy" divorce -- mistakes were made. 10 years later he almost lost a house because his ex declared personal bankruptcy. It took some fancy lawyering for me to save it for him. I did it gratis, but the same effort would have cost him ~$20K or more if he had to hire an attorney. Well, really, in his case, it would have been too late since he didn't even think it was an issue until he mentioned to me in passing on the last day before defaulting on the complaint.
      - behringer 8y ago
        A good lawyer definitely earns her pay.
  - expertentipp 8y ago
    > if you can bill $300 an hour for braindead work you can hand off to interns and just get checked by a lawyer before it goes out, why would they want to kill that cash cow? Various intern and entry-level positions in legal are notoriously low paid and involve many sacrifices. One starts to earn money allowing to sustain oneself maybe in mid-30s? If one survives until that point (i.e. family members in the profession already, or some other family predispositions).
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Contracts drafted by non-lawyers are as binding as any other contracts, and can be enforced in court either by individuals, or by a $25/hour lawyer from Craigslist. If a company hires a $300/hour lawyer (let's face it, these days more like $500+) to draft a contract, or to appear for it in court to enforce that contract, it's not because they have no other choice.
- mijamo 8y ago
  The problem is that legal people understand the contracts but are not able to take decision based on that. Oh sure that contracts says we would have to pay 10 millions if X happens, but then what is the likelihood of X happening, and what should be done to minimize it? Of course it sounds easy: "just tell the business guys the risk and they will assess the probability", but in practice there are thousands of different risks associated with a contract, even the simplest one, so that ends up being EXTREMELY difficult. And then you have all the contracts were the legal department thought they understood everything and it actually ends up not being as expected at all because rules and unclear, political and change like the wind, especially when it comes with international contracts.
- sametmax 8y ago
  The problem is we are obligated by law... to know and understand the law. So the issue is more than the law texts and contracts are too complicated for us to understand despite the fact we are living by them. You can't have a lawyer behind each decision of your life. But if you want to live a legal life, right now you need to. It's insane and not be sustainable for a democracy.
  - rayiner 8y ago
    They're not complicated! There's been a tremendous movement over the last 50 years to write the law in plain English and to banish legalese.
    - joncrocks 8y ago
      If they are not complicated, then there are no appeals right? And no law journals, no need of knowledge of precedents. In fact, why even have lawyers? I might agree that I could read the words in laws and think I understand them, but I disagree that 'the law' is that simple.
      - rayiner 8y ago
        We have Javascript developers, and blog posts, and knowledge of APIs, but nobody would call Javascript complicated.
        bitcurious 8y ago
        I've seen a lot of confusion about "this" in javascript, to the point of multiple articles making it to the front page of hacker news on the topic. Law is like javascript, except every other word needs the same context and explanation that "this" requires.
        gknoy 8y ago
        Not only that, but disagreements about what something means is often a Very Hard Problem, and even when courts judge something one way or another, there are many people who _disagree strongly_, and hope to either change the judiciary, or change the laws to more explicitly favor their position. (This is, as far as I recall, how one is supposed to resolve disagreements about what the law _should be_ in our country.) For example, many reasonable people disagree on whether the second amendment's wording is intended to mean that _everyone_ should be able to bear arms, or whether it's intended to mean _only people in a militia_, and there also seems to be some disagreement on what "arms" means. I can see how a reasonable person could interpret it in either way. Such disagreement seems to have been something which the founders themselves shared. tl;dr: People disagree both on what we currently interpret words in law to mean, as well as on what the _intent_ was when it was originally written.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  It can be a problem eg in the labour law field as a specialist in hr/ir law told me once that you get people who are told (by the lawyer that did their house purchase) down the golf club. "oh you can sue your employer for breach of contract over that" and the employee A) thinks that they can a do that and B) stand a chance of winning.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  The more I talk to lawyers, the more I'm convinced that a fair majority of lawyers are, consciously or not, extremely defensive about their job security. Think about this: If I give you the simplest piece of advice in legal matters, I'm heavily encouraged to declare I'm not a lawyer and that you should contact one. This is the only profession where I see this be so reliably the case. In other risk-averse professions (tax compliance, health) there is always the obvious "You should talk to a professional" but even in health it's not as heavy-handed. I've never seen a doctor say "I'm a doctor but this is not medical advice" when giving basic information. And I understand the superficial reasons why this is done, but there's just as many reasons not to get your buddy-mechanic to fix your car without them making you sign waivers. This matters because the people who most need legal advice are those who can't afford lawyers. Makes me very uneasy. Also to your CCO, I would say that if we were limited to what we would understand day-to-day, there would be no more learning. This is one of the core pillars of free software after all.
  - irl_zebra 8y ago
    One issue here is that law is heavily licensed in the US. Same as non-software engineering. So you need a law license or PE license to dispense legal or engineering advice, respectively. Doing so without those licenses is illegal (practicing without a license), which is likely the reason for the disclaimer from non lawyers. From lawyers, giving legal advice can create a lawyer-client relationship even absent specific agreement. It's less a job security thing and more a "not doing something illegal or which creates an unintentional client relationship" thing.
    - planteen 8y ago
      In my experience, PE is only relevant in two areas: civil engineering and power engineering. It is not common anywhere else, including aerospace engineering or biomedical engineering. So it's not just software where it is uncommon.
      - chrisdhoover 8y ago
        Also needed in structural
- PoppaSmurf 8y ago
  Even say a lay person does understand the contract, they still might not realize if that contract was written to heavily favor one side or the other. People who go to the internet to find a template contract to use might not know this either. You could be heavily screwing yourself by attempting to use a template contract that you don't know the origin of.
- elicash 8y ago
  Reminds me of the claim I've heard that everyone who has some impact on the design - including legal! - is a designer.
hanswesterbeek 8y ago
Clearly nobody lives in a legal vacuum. Those days have been gone for a couple of millennia.
- barrow-rider 8y ago
  By the articles logic, anyone with a budget must be accountant-ish, and anyone with a retirement plan or investments is financial planner-ish.
batty_alex 8y ago
Nevertheless, the crossover between the needs of legalish and what we perceive as the legal field is remarkable. As someone who spent five years as a software developer in the legal industry, this whole article comes off as a lot of fluff to sell a product. I'm not even really sure what it's suggesting aside from using them instead of lawyers, because the legal system is too conservative for automation... or something (not true).
zawerf 8y ago
Legal compliance is probably the worst part of building a side project. For example for basic levels of protection, you at least want a terms of service and privacy policy on your site. You'd think it's just copying and pasting some boilerplate. But say you want to allow user uploads, then you also need to not get screwed if someone uploads a picture owned by some copyright troll. So then you have to figure out how to get DMCA safe harbor status so you're not responsible for user content. And that requires: registering at a copyright office, monitoring email for timely takedowns, and communicating counter notices, etc. All of this work and we haven't gotten to GDPR compliance yet! At one point you just go fuck it, it's a side project. Just wrap it in a LLC so it can't bankrupt you even if you do get sued. But now you have to deal with company formation laws which is yet another can of worms.
- dudul 8y ago
  I've never had a serious side-project, but what you describe in your comment has always been my main concern. I remember asking a while ago on HN if it was a good idea to incorporate asap when building a side project to make sure you are protected, and most answers were "nah f-it, just build your thing and don't worry about it". Wasn't convinced.
- Tomte 8y ago
  The legal stuff is the difference between playing around and being serious. Unfortunately, the Internet has made it easy to harm and fuck over people far outside your circle of friends and acquaintances, so playing around isn't a viable option anymore.
- skummetmaelk 8y ago
  This is a consequence of enforcing the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. Bad actors keep finding loopholes to exploit and politicians fix them with patchwork resulting in overly complex monstrosities of legalese with a million little exceptions. Of course this just adds to the loophole problem. The only way to reliably fix this is to institute some form of judgment of whether or not an actor was following the spirit of the law. If they weren't they should have any advantages gained by skirting the law removed by force. Of course this leads to a different set of problems with the potential for overreaching state actors. One way to combat this could be making the judicial branch much more independent than it usually is in most countries.
jhabdas 8y ago
Leagalish Journalishm, suddenly now a thing
zekevermillion 8y ago
Law firms are famously late, but enthusiastic adopters of technology. Usually after all their clients are using it. For example the old blackberry -- law firms in New York were about a year behind, but once they tried it, they fell in love with handheld email. I don't think "smartphone" penetration was higher in any demographic circa 2005 than the ranks of Wall St lawyers. There are a few contemporary services like Workshare that have made inroads in the arena that Autto is entering. Contract workflow is a pretty tough nut to crack. I think the mistake a lot of non-lawyers make when selling to law firms, is they assume that most contract flow can/should be entirely automated. But complex legal drafting is still an exercise that demands a lot of wet brain matter.
OliverJones 8y ago
My spouse is a human lawyer. She's working now for a software company; she did her part taking it public a few years ago. She knows our trade pretty well. The difference between a lawyer on the one hand, and a "jailhouse lawyer" (an engineer who does legalish work) on the other, are these: The lawyer knows how to get things done to support the business. It's rare for a real in-house lawyer to tell the business, "we can't do that." More often, it's "here's how we do that." The lawyer knows how to write a form contract (sales, lease, nondisclosure, etc) so other lawyers will read it and say "ok, that's fair" and sign it. The lawyer knows how to read an incoming form contract to see if it's fair. The lawyer has real relationships with her counterparts at customer and vendor companies. When a vendor tries to change terms, she calls her counterpart and asks, "what's this about? My business has problems with this. How can we get to yes?" The lawyer knows that if a dispute gets to a judge, the remedy will be money. With very few exceptions there's no way for a judge to repair a business deal that's gone sideways. So the lawyer says, "anything but court." At some level, the law is like computer code. But the computer code has been around for many centuries and it has been patched over and over and over again as needed to solve real-world problems: in the US and English system that's called "case law.". There's an adage that "hard cases make bad case law." Lawyers know the ins and outs of this stuff. In my experience as an entrepreneur, when I've played lawyer I've generally overdone things to my detriment. The US is definitely litigation-happy. That makes things tough.
- someguydave 8y ago
  I believe you. It is unfortunate that the implicit knowledge and professional relationships you mention are not available to non-lawyers.
  - drchiu 8y ago
    It's almost a right of passage to be part of the "trade", so to speak. Same thing goes for doctors. When a doctor recognizes the counterparty is a a fellow physician, the conversation changes to reflect that. There are exceptions (as do all things in the world), but this professional courtesy happens regardless of whether the two parties have ever had a prior relationship.
dkarl 8y ago
We are all lawyers now? People have always dealt with the law. They get into disputes over wages, buy and sell property, get married, get divorced. Shakespeare included lawyer jokes in his plays. The self-service legal industry predates the internet; I remember the packets you could buy at the bookstore for do-it-yourself wills and divorces. I know, I know, it's marketing fluff so I'm supposed to give bullshit a pass, but why are we upvoting marketing fluff on HN?
rv-de 8y ago
I never founded a company or started a business. I've been thinking about that a lot though and am doing so in intervals. Now my personality leads me to always think through everything very carefully to avoid making mistakes - I'm regularly overthinking and often getting trapped in paralysis by analysis. This especially is true in the context of business with regard to laws and taxes. Having worked in more than a handful of companies full-time by now I made an interesting observation I intend to learn from and have it inspire future decision making. Most founders - especially in the earlier stages - don't worry very much about the intricacies of laws and regulation. I can safely say that most companies I worked at entered deeply into gray areas like sailing with a dinghy on high sea and enjoying the great weather. Every experienced captain would argue that is pretty darn dangerous. But the consequence of that would be staying home - meaning "no business". So my conclusion is that successful entrepreneurs are the kind of people who take risks while being aware, half-aware or totally unaware - because successful entrepreneurs simply don't worry much in general. Sociologically those men and women usually have a somewhat wealthy background having kept them from worrying throughout their youth and hence their brain circuits dealing with worrying are somewhat underdeveloped - I suppose. Some get their finger's burnt and some don't.
- gamblor956 8y ago
  Most of the successful entrepreneurs I know that run real businesses--not the "startups" that have been all the rage the past few years, but real, money-making, profit-earning businesses--address the legal and regulatory stuff from the beginning. It's part of their business plan and business model from the beginning. This is true of the one-man contractors to multi-billion dollar corporations. Real entrepreneurs don't wing it. And for the ones that don't worry about the compliance stuff, it's because they're paying a ton of money to specialists like me to do the worrying for them.
  - rv-de 8y ago
    Well, if it needs a ton of money to have you worry professionally then your sampling is biased towards large companies. The businesses I am referring to were all profit-earning.
amelius 8y ago
I wish lawyers used a more formal language, that computers can interpret. Perhaps we're heading in that direction with blockchain contracts, etc. Better sooner than later, imho.
pnw_hazor 8y ago
Law is a bit like physics. It does its thing whether you understand it or not. So most times folks can navigate through life w/o understanding much law, just like non-techies can use telephones w/o understanding how electricity or radios works. As with most things, its the edge cases that get you in trouble. And, it usually takes more legal expertise than most non-lawyers have to recognize potential legal edge cases.

> ‘Aren’t we all in the legal field to some extent?’ I heard a CCO complaining that non-legal people should not have access to any contracts. Her claim was that they would read those contracts and think they understand them, while in fact they won't. She considered this a too great risk because only legal people could truly understand them. She'll love this piece.

gearhart 8y ago
If you can't understand a contract you're signing, you aren't really signing it. It's a very protective industry - you go through a lot of very expensive and time-consuming training and selection to get to be a certified lawyer, everyone in the industry has a heavily vested interest in making sure that there's a lot of valuable work that only certified lawyers can do. No wonder, then, that they're resistant to automation - if you can bill $300 an hour for braindead work you can hand off to interns and just get checked by a lawyer before it goes out, why would they want to kill that cash cow? The trouble is that quite apart from the rent-seeking cartel behaviour, it skews our entire legal system to much better serve those who can afford to pay for lawyers. Perhaps the government ought to be supporting legal automation services.
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  We are trying to file our non-profit. An office said they could, expecting it to take 3-4 hours, at 200$/hr. I found out this can be done for a 45$ filing fee in about 20 minutes. That nice girl on the phone was straight evil.
- howard941 8y ago
  Resistance varies greatly depending on jurisdiction. Your terminology suggests you're not in the USA (pardon me if I'm mistaken). Over here in the states the established firms have a vested interest in automating or offshoring (or both) as much as possible, for obvious reasons. The US government should be supporting legal aid for civil matters. From watching the boob tube civil matter legal aid is a thing in old Blighty. Pity we didn't adopt that along with the common law. But w/r/t govt funding in the US it can barely finance public defenders (to which there is a right, if I read Gideon correctly) and anyway, it's every man for himself. That's the American way.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    > From watching the boob tube civil matter legal aid is a thing in old Blighty. No, absolutely not. You get legal aid if you're being prosecuted for a crime. You get legal aid if the state is trying to remove your children (but only at the point where they've served the notice and gone to court). You might get legal aid in family court (for divorce or child contact arrangements) if your spouse was abusive. You might get legal aid in court of protection. But for most civil law there is no legal aid available: you use the small claims track or you pay for lawyers.
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  Who says lawyers are resistant to automation? E-discovery is a booming market. Y-combinator just funded a startup called Klarity that reads and interprets contracts for you.
  - barrow-rider 8y ago
    Seriously. I used to run data centers on both coasts and we had easily a half a dozen eDiscovery firms and several regular law firms with big data center presences -- presumably because they're using some of those tools. Hourly billing rates of $300/hr make law a juicy target for technical disruption.
- pydry 8y ago
  I worked with some lawyers on some legal (finance based) automation based work and they weren't overtly resistant to automation at all, but it was fairly self evident that they were used to over-complicating everything - e.g. creating legal work to counter entirely hypothetical risks or explaining really simple things in a overly complicated way. They would habitually take 5 minutes to explain something in a hard to understand way that could be explained in 30 seconds clearly with zero loss of information. It reminded me of the software engineers I've worked with who manufactured job security with dizzying levels of technical debt.
  - pnw_hazor 8y ago
    Lawyers may lose their license if their explanations to clients are not complete. Generally, I find non-lawyers are often lazy, sloppy, or indefinite when speaking or writing. When I was a software engineer I didn't notice it, now I see or hear sloppy/lazy language everywhere and it bugs the crap out of me.
  - gamblor956 8y ago
    When you're dealing with anything involving more than a few zeroes, those edge cases are the point of hiring lawyers, because those edge cases are usually what lawsuits turn on. If you don't believe edge cases matter, just ask Cleveland how it feels about losing the (original) Browns...
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >If you can't understand a contract you're signing, you aren't really signing it. The problem isn't that people don't understand things. The problem is that they think they understand them only to find out that a ton of key words they thought they understood are actually pointers to specific legal concepts (which themselves may have pointers and so on) within the niche area of law the contract covers and they are blindsided by this to their detriment when there is a disagreement over whether the terms are satisfied. This is particularly insidious (because of the preexisting power imbalance) when the legal matter is not contracts but state and local civil code and ordinance. People think they're complying with the law but they're really not and it gives the government power of arbitrary enforcement (which leads to abuse and corruption).
  - CPLX 8y ago
    Is it “insidious” when only software developers fully understand edge cases and complicated dependencies? Or is that just how software works? Isn’t software by definition just a collection of many relatively simple rules and procedures? Sometimes complicated systems are complicated. It’s true that lawyers can have a knack for overthinking things sometimes but fundamentally these concepts are difficult and people’s rights and responsibilities and obligations and agreements overlap in complicated ways that often just don’t lend themselves to anything but sophisticated analysis.
  - someguydave 8y ago
    1. Lawyers are licensed by the state to work in the interest of the public 2. They (along with lawyers like judges and legislators) create a guild with its own language which has the side-effect of empowering knowing lawyers over a reasonably literate layman 3. The public is now required to "ask a lawyer before doing anything" for "their safety"
- SpelingBeeChamp 8y ago
  Interestingly, there are many legal settings in the United States where non-lawyers have roles roughly identical to those of attorneys. See here: https://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/20072450-RolesforNonlawyerPractitioners.pdf https://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/20072450-Rolesfor...
- behringer 8y ago
  Many regional governments offer the paperwork you need right on their government website. In my state, you can easily sue for damages, child support, custody and many other common matters without any lawyer.
  - pnw_hazor 8y ago
    Suing is the easy part. A friend did a non-lawyer "quick and easy" divorce -- mistakes were made. 10 years later he almost lost a house because his ex declared personal bankruptcy. It took some fancy lawyering for me to save it for him. I did it gratis, but the same effort would have cost him ~$20K or more if he had to hire an attorney. Well, really, in his case, it would have been too late since he didn't even think it was an issue until he mentioned to me in passing on the last day before defaulting on the complaint.
    - behringer 8y ago
      A good lawyer definitely earns her pay.
- expertentipp 8y ago
  > if you can bill $300 an hour for braindead work you can hand off to interns and just get checked by a lawyer before it goes out, why would they want to kill that cash cow? Various intern and entry-level positions in legal are notoriously low paid and involve many sacrifices. One starts to earn money allowing to sustain oneself maybe in mid-30s? If one survives until that point (i.e. family members in the profession already, or some other family predispositions).
- rayiner 8y ago
  Contracts drafted by non-lawyers are as binding as any other contracts, and can be enforced in court either by individuals, or by a $25/hour lawyer from Craigslist. If a company hires a $300/hour lawyer (let's face it, these days more like $500+) to draft a contract, or to appear for it in court to enforce that contract, it's not because they have no other choice.
mijamo 8y ago
The problem is that legal people understand the contracts but are not able to take decision based on that. Oh sure that contracts says we would have to pay 10 millions if X happens, but then what is the likelihood of X happening, and what should be done to minimize it? Of course it sounds easy: "just tell the business guys the risk and they will assess the probability", but in practice there are thousands of different risks associated with a contract, even the simplest one, so that ends up being EXTREMELY difficult. And then you have all the contracts were the legal department thought they understood everything and it actually ends up not being as expected at all because rules and unclear, political and change like the wind, especially when it comes with international contracts.
sametmax 8y ago
The problem is we are obligated by law... to know and understand the law. So the issue is more than the law texts and contracts are too complicated for us to understand despite the fact we are living by them. You can't have a lawyer behind each decision of your life. But if you want to live a legal life, right now you need to. It's insane and not be sustainable for a democracy.
- rayiner 8y ago
  They're not complicated! There's been a tremendous movement over the last 50 years to write the law in plain English and to banish legalese.
  - joncrocks 8y ago
    If they are not complicated, then there are no appeals right? And no law journals, no need of knowledge of precedents. In fact, why even have lawyers? I might agree that I could read the words in laws and think I understand them, but I disagree that 'the law' is that simple.
    - rayiner 8y ago
      We have Javascript developers, and blog posts, and knowledge of APIs, but nobody would call Javascript complicated.
      - bitcurious 8y ago
        I've seen a lot of confusion about "this" in javascript, to the point of multiple articles making it to the front page of hacker news on the topic. Law is like javascript, except every other word needs the same context and explanation that "this" requires.
        gknoy 8y ago
        Not only that, but disagreements about what something means is often a Very Hard Problem, and even when courts judge something one way or another, there are many people who _disagree strongly_, and hope to either change the judiciary, or change the laws to more explicitly favor their position. (This is, as far as I recall, how one is supposed to resolve disagreements about what the law _should be_ in our country.) For example, many reasonable people disagree on whether the second amendment's wording is intended to mean that _everyone_ should be able to bear arms, or whether it's intended to mean _only people in a militia_, and there also seems to be some disagreement on what "arms" means. I can see how a reasonable person could interpret it in either way. Such disagreement seems to have been something which the founders themselves shared. tl;dr: People disagree both on what we currently interpret words in law to mean, as well as on what the _intent_ was when it was originally written.
C1sc0cat 8y ago
It can be a problem eg in the labour law field as a specialist in hr/ir law told me once that you get people who are told (by the lawyer that did their house purchase) down the golf club. "oh you can sue your employer for breach of contract over that" and the employee A) thinks that they can a do that and B) stand a chance of winning.
scrollaway 8y ago
The more I talk to lawyers, the more I'm convinced that a fair majority of lawyers are, consciously or not, extremely defensive about their job security. Think about this: If I give you the simplest piece of advice in legal matters, I'm heavily encouraged to declare I'm not a lawyer and that you should contact one. This is the only profession where I see this be so reliably the case. In other risk-averse professions (tax compliance, health) there is always the obvious "You should talk to a professional" but even in health it's not as heavy-handed. I've never seen a doctor say "I'm a doctor but this is not medical advice" when giving basic information. And I understand the superficial reasons why this is done, but there's just as many reasons not to get your buddy-mechanic to fix your car without them making you sign waivers. This matters because the people who most need legal advice are those who can't afford lawyers. Makes me very uneasy. Also to your CCO, I would say that if we were limited to what we would understand day-to-day, there would be no more learning. This is one of the core pillars of free software after all.
- irl_zebra 8y ago
  One issue here is that law is heavily licensed in the US. Same as non-software engineering. So you need a law license or PE license to dispense legal or engineering advice, respectively. Doing so without those licenses is illegal (practicing without a license), which is likely the reason for the disclaimer from non lawyers. From lawyers, giving legal advice can create a lawyer-client relationship even absent specific agreement. It's less a job security thing and more a "not doing something illegal or which creates an unintentional client relationship" thing.
  - planteen 8y ago
    In my experience, PE is only relevant in two areas: civil engineering and power engineering. It is not common anywhere else, including aerospace engineering or biomedical engineering. So it's not just software where it is uncommon.
    - chrisdhoover 8y ago
      Also needed in structural
PoppaSmurf 8y ago
Even say a lay person does understand the contract, they still might not realize if that contract was written to heavily favor one side or the other. People who go to the internet to find a template contract to use might not know this either. You could be heavily screwing yourself by attempting to use a template contract that you don't know the origin of.
elicash 8y ago
Reminds me of the claim I've heard that everyone who has some impact on the design - including legal! - is a designer.

hanswesterbeek 8y ago

Clearly nobody lives in a legal vacuum. Those days have been gone for a couple of millennia.

barrow-rider 8y ago
By the articles logic, anyone with a budget must be accountant-ish, and anyone with a retirement plan or investments is financial planner-ish.

batty_alex 8y ago

Nevertheless, the crossover between the needs of legalish and what we perceive as the legal field is remarkable. As someone who spent five years as a software developer in the legal industry, this whole article comes off as a lot of fluff to sell a product. I'm not even really sure what it's suggesting aside from using them instead of lawyers, because the legal system is too conservative for automation... or something (not true).

zawerf 8y ago

Legal compliance is probably the worst part of building a side project. For example for basic levels of protection, you at least want a terms of service and privacy policy on your site. You'd think it's just copying and pasting some boilerplate. But say you want to allow user uploads, then you also need to not get screwed if someone uploads a picture owned by some copyright troll. So then you have to figure out how to get DMCA safe harbor status so you're not responsible for user content. And that requires: registering at a copyright office, monitoring email for timely takedowns, and communicating counter notices, etc. All of this work and we haven't gotten to GDPR compliance yet! At one point you just go fuck it, it's a side project. Just wrap it in a LLC so it can't bankrupt you even if you do get sued. But now you have to deal with company formation laws which is yet another can of worms.

dudul 8y ago
I've never had a serious side-project, but what you describe in your comment has always been my main concern. I remember asking a while ago on HN if it was a good idea to incorporate asap when building a side project to make sure you are protected, and most answers were "nah f-it, just build your thing and don't worry about it". Wasn't convinced.
Tomte 8y ago
The legal stuff is the difference between playing around and being serious. Unfortunately, the Internet has made it easy to harm and fuck over people far outside your circle of friends and acquaintances, so playing around isn't a viable option anymore.
skummetmaelk 8y ago
This is a consequence of enforcing the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. Bad actors keep finding loopholes to exploit and politicians fix them with patchwork resulting in overly complex monstrosities of legalese with a million little exceptions. Of course this just adds to the loophole problem. The only way to reliably fix this is to institute some form of judgment of whether or not an actor was following the spirit of the law. If they weren't they should have any advantages gained by skirting the law removed by force. Of course this leads to a different set of problems with the potential for overreaching state actors. One way to combat this could be making the judicial branch much more independent than it usually is in most countries.

jhabdas 8y ago

Leagalish Journalishm, suddenly now a thing

zekevermillion 8y ago

Law firms are famously late, but enthusiastic adopters of technology. Usually after all their clients are using it. For example the old blackberry -- law firms in New York were about a year behind, but once they tried it, they fell in love with handheld email. I don't think "smartphone" penetration was higher in any demographic circa 2005 than the ranks of Wall St lawyers. There are a few contemporary services like Workshare that have made inroads in the arena that Autto is entering. Contract workflow is a pretty tough nut to crack. I think the mistake a lot of non-lawyers make when selling to law firms, is they assume that most contract flow can/should be entirely automated. But complex legal drafting is still an exercise that demands a lot of wet brain matter.

OliverJones 8y ago

My spouse is a human lawyer. She's working now for a software company; she did her part taking it public a few years ago. She knows our trade pretty well. The difference between a lawyer on the one hand, and a "jailhouse lawyer" (an engineer who does legalish work) on the other, are these: The lawyer knows how to get things done to support the business. It's rare for a real in-house lawyer to tell the business, "we can't do that." More often, it's "here's how we do that." The lawyer knows how to write a form contract (sales, lease, nondisclosure, etc) so other lawyers will read it and say "ok, that's fair" and sign it. The lawyer knows how to read an incoming form contract to see if it's fair. The lawyer has real relationships with her counterparts at customer and vendor companies. When a vendor tries to change terms, she calls her counterpart and asks, "what's this about? My business has problems with this. How can we get to yes?" The lawyer knows that if a dispute gets to a judge, the remedy will be money. With very few exceptions there's no way for a judge to repair a business deal that's gone sideways. So the lawyer says, "anything but court." At some level, the law is like computer code. But the computer code has been around for many centuries and it has been patched over and over and over again as needed to solve real-world problems: in the US and English system that's called "case law.". There's an adage that "hard cases make bad case law." Lawyers know the ins and outs of this stuff. In my experience as an entrepreneur, when I've played lawyer I've generally overdone things to my detriment. The US is definitely litigation-happy. That makes things tough.

someguydave 8y ago
I believe you. It is unfortunate that the implicit knowledge and professional relationships you mention are not available to non-lawyers.
- drchiu 8y ago
  It's almost a right of passage to be part of the "trade", so to speak. Same thing goes for doctors. When a doctor recognizes the counterparty is a a fellow physician, the conversation changes to reflect that. There are exceptions (as do all things in the world), but this professional courtesy happens regardless of whether the two parties have ever had a prior relationship.

dkarl 8y ago

We are all lawyers now? People have always dealt with the law. They get into disputes over wages, buy and sell property, get married, get divorced. Shakespeare included lawyer jokes in his plays. The self-service legal industry predates the internet; I remember the packets you could buy at the bookstore for do-it-yourself wills and divorces. I know, I know, it's marketing fluff so I'm supposed to give bullshit a pass, but why are we upvoting marketing fluff on HN?

rv-de 8y ago

I never founded a company or started a business. I've been thinking about that a lot though and am doing so in intervals. Now my personality leads me to always think through everything very carefully to avoid making mistakes - I'm regularly overthinking and often getting trapped in paralysis by analysis. This especially is true in the context of business with regard to laws and taxes. Having worked in more than a handful of companies full-time by now I made an interesting observation I intend to learn from and have it inspire future decision making. Most founders - especially in the earlier stages - don't worry very much about the intricacies of laws and regulation. I can safely say that most companies I worked at entered deeply into gray areas like sailing with a dinghy on high sea and enjoying the great weather. Every experienced captain would argue that is pretty darn dangerous. But the consequence of that would be staying home - meaning "no business". So my conclusion is that successful entrepreneurs are the kind of people who take risks while being aware, half-aware or totally unaware - because successful entrepreneurs simply don't worry much in general. Sociologically those men and women usually have a somewhat wealthy background having kept them from worrying throughout their youth and hence their brain circuits dealing with worrying are somewhat underdeveloped - I suppose. Some get their finger's burnt and some don't.

gamblor956 8y ago
Most of the successful entrepreneurs I know that run real businesses--not the "startups" that have been all the rage the past few years, but real, money-making, profit-earning businesses--address the legal and regulatory stuff from the beginning. It's part of their business plan and business model from the beginning. This is true of the one-man contractors to multi-billion dollar corporations. Real entrepreneurs don't wing it. And for the ones that don't worry about the compliance stuff, it's because they're paying a ton of money to specialists like me to do the worrying for them.
- rv-de 8y ago
  Well, if it needs a ton of money to have you worry professionally then your sampling is biased towards large companies. The businesses I am referring to were all profit-earning.

amelius 8y ago

I wish lawyers used a more formal language, that computers can interpret. Perhaps we're heading in that direction with blockchain contracts, etc. Better sooner than later, imho.

pnw_hazor 8y ago

Law is a bit like physics. It does its thing whether you understand it or not. So most times folks can navigate through life w/o understanding much law, just like non-techies can use telephones w/o understanding how electricity or radios works. As with most things, its the edge cases that get you in trouble. And, it usually takes more legal expertise than most non-lawyers have to recognize potential legal edge cases.