5 ms·

as a former lawyer who has handled large and small document reviews, i can say that both doc review platforms i used, concordance and caselogistix are horrendou

by smalter 16y ago

as a former lawyer who has handled large and small document reviews, i can say that both doc review platforms i used, concordance and caselogistix are horrendous and there is certainly an opportunity here for someone to do this right.

btilly 16y ago
Unfortunately this classifies as enterprise software, and therefore the quality of the software is not particularly important for its adoption. See http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/000772.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/0... for more on this.
ssp 16y ago
A bit of a tangent, but would something like source control (git, hg) be useful to lawyers? If they are cutting and pasting from older documents all the time, it seems like it would.
- smalter 16y ago
  i think within most big law firms, there may be an enormous team which reviews documents, but when it comes to drafting documents, even at the biggest firms those teams are relatively small. i helped draft a section of a 2000 page document and the whole document just consisted of separate word documents with subjects like "chapter 1 rev2 final 9-3-2009.doc" which are passed around via email. but since the teams are relatively small, there aren't that many versions floating around so that can do a passable, if sometimes irritating, job. there are some types of version control already out there which lawyers use, e.g., hummingbird dm. it's pretty lame and annoying to use which is why many lawyers i know just do what i describe above for version control. so bottom line: yes, it'd be useful, but it would have to be very easy to use otherwise people would just use marginally more annoying but in some ways much easier to use (don't have to learn how to do something new) methods.
- btilly 16y ago
  My immediate thought as a non-lawyer is that source control works better with plain text than it does with binary data in proprietary formats. Unfortunately lawyers have to deal with a lot of real world data from random IT systems, much of which will come as images, Word documents, spreadsheets, etc. So the idea of source control is probably useful. The current state of the art? Maybe less so.
seanalltogether 16y ago
legal software is such a lucrative market for someone to do something right. lawyers are so ass backwards in terms of technology, and the problem is it's not a profession where tech entrepreneurs normally grow out of. One of my good friends works at an office where the secretaries put everyones tasks in to outlook just so they can have the calendar pop up telling them which case to work on from one hour to the next. Developer task management tools are light years ahead of the law world.
- flipbrad 16y ago
  it's not just task management: as a newbie to the legal world, I would like to learn about software development / good coding practice to improve my contract drafting (which, not being a coder, I think of in the following terms: define the variables; find the right includes; structure it appropriately, in modules if possible; test; annotate)
elblanco 16y ago
I think there are a couple barriers to entry for new people to watch out for (having tried to go down this path in a past venture): 1) Don't try and save time (or at least don't focus on that), lawyers charge by time spent, saving time looses them money. 2) Your product needs good OCR. Many times, documents, even electronic ones, are printed out on paper, delivered in boxes, then scanned back in...don't ask why, that's just the way the world works. 3) You'll need pretty robust searching, tagging and entity extraction and case management in your product. 4) Visualization doesn't hurt. 5) There's many kinds of law, pick one (patent law) and focus on it. While there's some crossover between different sub-disciplines, they're different enough that you kinda have to just support one to start with. 6) You'll want a very robust data index and retrieval system that can handle millions of documents at scale. "Lots of documents" is not in the 4 digit thousands, they have paralegals and newbie lawyers to go through that amount of stuff, "Lots of documents" is 20,000->2 or 3 million documents. It's at the larger number that you'll be providing real value. No matter how much time the firm wants to charge for this kind of research work, they can't charge infinity, so their coverage of the material will always just be some subset. 7) Learn about the kinds of pricing models that'll work for you clients. Surprisingly, most law firms don't want to buy software, they want to lease it for the length of the case. 8) Most lawyers have the computer skills of a 90 year old man. It can't be a super technical system.
- andrew1 16y ago
  > 1) Don't try and save time (or at least don't focus on that), lawyers charge by time spent, saving time looses them money. But if you became quick enough that you could make a point of it to your clients, then presumably you could charge more per hour. Exaggerated example, but if you could say to your clients (and back it up with previous cases) that the work that other companies are quoting them a year to do will only take you six months, but you want 50% more per hour then that works out well for the both of you?
  - elblanco 16y ago
    You'd probably need some really good and hard metrics on that to make a case...say my lawyer normally charges $400/hr, now she wants to charge me $700/hr but claims, "I can do it twice as fast". I'm not sure I'm totally sold on that claim. I found that the time saving messaging fell absolutely flat (we can cover the same number of documents x-times faster). The only message that resonated was the coverage messaging (we can cover more documents during the limited discovery period)...and then only with firms that were working cases that involved hundreds of thousands of documents -- too much for them to staff up on. The case/document management aspect of it seems to be where the real interest level lies and if you can offer lots of capability for drawing connections between disparate groups of documents it could have some true value. A digital organizer capable of aiding connection building. At least that's what I remember. We did a bit of research into the market before deciding not to chase it due to the level of funding we would need to get a product to market.
thevectorist 16y ago
Relativity is a more modern alternative to Concordance. http://www.kcura.com http://www.kcura.com

by smalter 16y ago

btilly 16y ago

Unfortunately this classifies as enterprise software, and therefore the quality of the software is not particularly important for its adoption. See http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/000772.html http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/0... for more on this.

ssp 16y ago

A bit of a tangent, but would something like source control (git, hg) be useful to lawyers? If they are cutting and pasting from older documents all the time, it seems like it would.

smalter 16y ago
i think within most big law firms, there may be an enormous team which reviews documents, but when it comes to drafting documents, even at the biggest firms those teams are relatively small. i helped draft a section of a 2000 page document and the whole document just consisted of separate word documents with subjects like "chapter 1 rev2 final 9-3-2009.doc" which are passed around via email. but since the teams are relatively small, there aren't that many versions floating around so that can do a passable, if sometimes irritating, job. there are some types of version control already out there which lawyers use, e.g., hummingbird dm. it's pretty lame and annoying to use which is why many lawyers i know just do what i describe above for version control. so bottom line: yes, it'd be useful, but it would have to be very easy to use otherwise people would just use marginally more annoying but in some ways much easier to use (don't have to learn how to do something new) methods.
btilly 16y ago
My immediate thought as a non-lawyer is that source control works better with plain text than it does with binary data in proprietary formats. Unfortunately lawyers have to deal with a lot of real world data from random IT systems, much of which will come as images, Word documents, spreadsheets, etc. So the idea of source control is probably useful. The current state of the art? Maybe less so.

seanalltogether 16y ago

legal software is such a lucrative market for someone to do something right. lawyers are so ass backwards in terms of technology, and the problem is it's not a profession where tech entrepreneurs normally grow out of. One of my good friends works at an office where the secretaries put everyones tasks in to outlook just so they can have the calendar pop up telling them which case to work on from one hour to the next. Developer task management tools are light years ahead of the law world.

flipbrad 16y ago
it's not just task management: as a newbie to the legal world, I would like to learn about software development / good coding practice to improve my contract drafting (which, not being a coder, I think of in the following terms: define the variables; find the right includes; structure it appropriately, in modules if possible; test; annotate)

elblanco 16y ago

I think there are a couple barriers to entry for new people to watch out for (having tried to go down this path in a past venture): 1) Don't try and save time (or at least don't focus on that), lawyers charge by time spent, saving time looses them money. 2) Your product needs good OCR. Many times, documents, even electronic ones, are printed out on paper, delivered in boxes, then scanned back in...don't ask why, that's just the way the world works. 3) You'll need pretty robust searching, tagging and entity extraction and case management in your product. 4) Visualization doesn't hurt. 5) There's many kinds of law, pick one (patent law) and focus on it. While there's some crossover between different sub-disciplines, they're different enough that you kinda have to just support one to start with. 6) You'll want a very robust data index and retrieval system that can handle millions of documents at scale. "Lots of documents" is not in the 4 digit thousands, they have paralegals and newbie lawyers to go through that amount of stuff, "Lots of documents" is 20,000->2 or 3 million documents. It's at the larger number that you'll be providing real value. No matter how much time the firm wants to charge for this kind of research work, they can't charge infinity, so their coverage of the material will always just be some subset. 7) Learn about the kinds of pricing models that'll work for you clients. Surprisingly, most law firms don't want to buy software, they want to lease it for the length of the case. 8) Most lawyers have the computer skills of a 90 year old man. It can't be a super technical system.

andrew1 16y ago
> 1) Don't try and save time (or at least don't focus on that), lawyers charge by time spent, saving time looses them money. But if you became quick enough that you could make a point of it to your clients, then presumably you could charge more per hour. Exaggerated example, but if you could say to your clients (and back it up with previous cases) that the work that other companies are quoting them a year to do will only take you six months, but you want 50% more per hour then that works out well for the both of you?
- elblanco 16y ago
  You'd probably need some really good and hard metrics on that to make a case...say my lawyer normally charges $400/hr, now she wants to charge me $700/hr but claims, "I can do it twice as fast". I'm not sure I'm totally sold on that claim. I found that the time saving messaging fell absolutely flat (we can cover the same number of documents x-times faster). The only message that resonated was the coverage messaging (we can cover more documents during the limited discovery period)...and then only with firms that were working cases that involved hundreds of thousands of documents -- too much for them to staff up on. The case/document management aspect of it seems to be where the real interest level lies and if you can offer lots of capability for drawing connections between disparate groups of documents it could have some true value. A digital organizer capable of aiding connection building. At least that's what I remember. We did a bit of research into the market before deciding not to chase it due to the level of funding we would need to get a product to market.

thevectorist 16y ago

Relativity is a more modern alternative to Concordance. http://www.kcura.com http://www.kcura.com