4 ms·

In my experience, this is the bread and butter for a lot of law firms. Especially for simpler things like rental contracts and property conveyancing etc. It's g

by osrec 8y ago

In my experience, this is the bread and butter for a lot of law firms. Especially for simpler things like rental contracts and property conveyancing etc. It's got to be disrupted soon enough!

shard972 8y ago
I wouldn't hold my breath on law being disrupted, they are quite happy the way they are thank you very much.
- Sabinus 8y ago
  You don't need the permission of encumbants to disrupt their industry. You just take their customers.
  - chii 8y ago
    Cept as lawyers, they are in an exceptional position to sue you, as this is their battle ground, unlike taxi drivers or renters.
  - owenmarshall 8y ago
    The legal industry - an explicit manifestation of state power - will require a great deal of guns and soldiers to disrupt.
    - patentatt 8y ago
      It’s much less the “state” as in the government than the state bar associations and such. They’re guilds, essentially, and quite protectionist ones at that.
  - pkilgore 8y ago
    It's like Uber, except we take on massive liability for each thing we do because by law we have to. /s This company is about the closest I've seen to disrupting anything so far. https://www.legalpad.io https://www.legalpad.io My experience and observable reality show that it's hard. There's a reason even the techiest of companies still pay an army of lawyers in house and still go to the best firms for major transactions and disputes:
pkilgore 8y ago
Disrupted how in this case? Lawyers usually use forms / boilerplate because they have worked in the past. Many of these forms are the sum total of thousands of hours of time and refinement over tens of years. Nobody wants to pay a lawyer to reproduce that -- at least, nobody in retail law (big corporate settlement contracts? Those see many many hours of revision and negotion, but ultimately are still based on a core form that rarely changes). I agree that a copy+paste job seems like you are getting cheated. But like an engineer, a lawyer isn't charging you for typing, or turning a screwdriver. They are charging for knowing what contract you need, etc. What's honestly shocking right now are the alternatives. What LegalZoom gave my friend to start an LLC would have been malpractice had it come from an actual lawyer. (But surprise! You can't sue legal zoom as easily for that thing as you can a lawyer). Imo what really needs to go is hourly billing. But that's another conversation, and a really hard problem.
- osrec 8y ago
  I don't know how exactly, but perhaps we could have an open git repository-esque method for refining contracts. Right now, one law firm refines its own contracts over the lifetime of the firm. Why not democratise the entire process and make it open? Then lawyers can stop ripping people off for this sort of non-work and instead focus on actually providing legal counsel (which is what you truly should be paying a lawyer for).
  - pkilgore 8y ago
    > Invoice > Task. By. Rate. > -------------- > Fix form. Paralegal $ 100 > Knowing what Lawyer. $ 4,900 > form to fix.
  - pkilgore 8y ago
    Honest legal Invoice Task. By. Rate. ------------------------------------ Fix form. Paralegal $ 100 Knowing what Lawyer $ 3,900 form to fix. Accepting. Firm $ 1000 liability ------------------------------------ We already live in a world where reuse of forms save clients money. True disruption changes the obvious problem above: how do you replace the cost of professional judgement and trust? If you're an engineer today, you don't get paid poorly because Mongo and Postgres already exist. You get paid well if you know whether a document store or a RDS is the best fit for the systems problem at hand based on a careers worth of experience. As someone who has done both for a living, it's shocking how much overlap there is (overlap that I assume exists in among doctors, accountants, consultants).

by osrec 8y ago

In my experience, this is the bread and butter for a lot of law firms. Especially for simpler things like rental contracts and property conveyancing etc. It's got to be disrupted soon enough!

shard972 8y ago

I wouldn't hold my breath on law being disrupted, they are quite happy the way they are thank you very much.

Sabinus 8y ago
You don't need the permission of encumbants to disrupt their industry. You just take their customers.
- chii 8y ago
  Cept as lawyers, they are in an exceptional position to sue you, as this is their battle ground, unlike taxi drivers or renters.
- owenmarshall 8y ago
  The legal industry - an explicit manifestation of state power - will require a great deal of guns and soldiers to disrupt.
  - patentatt 8y ago
    It’s much less the “state” as in the government than the state bar associations and such. They’re guilds, essentially, and quite protectionist ones at that.
- pkilgore 8y ago
  It's like Uber, except we take on massive liability for each thing we do because by law we have to. /s This company is about the closest I've seen to disrupting anything so far. https://www.legalpad.io https://www.legalpad.io My experience and observable reality show that it's hard. There's a reason even the techiest of companies still pay an army of lawyers in house and still go to the best firms for major transactions and disputes:

pkilgore 8y ago

Disrupted how in this case? Lawyers usually use forms / boilerplate because they have worked in the past. Many of these forms are the sum total of thousands of hours of time and refinement over tens of years. Nobody wants to pay a lawyer to reproduce that -- at least, nobody in retail law (big corporate settlement contracts? Those see many many hours of revision and negotion, but ultimately are still based on a core form that rarely changes). I agree that a copy+paste job seems like you are getting cheated. But like an engineer, a lawyer isn't charging you for typing, or turning a screwdriver. They are charging for knowing what contract you need, etc. What's honestly shocking right now are the alternatives. What LegalZoom gave my friend to start an LLC would have been malpractice had it come from an actual lawyer. (But surprise! You can't sue legal zoom as easily for that thing as you can a lawyer). Imo what really needs to go is hourly billing. But that's another conversation, and a really hard problem.

osrec 8y ago
I don't know how exactly, but perhaps we could have an open git repository-esque method for refining contracts. Right now, one law firm refines its own contracts over the lifetime of the firm. Why not democratise the entire process and make it open? Then lawyers can stop ripping people off for this sort of non-work and instead focus on actually providing legal counsel (which is what you truly should be paying a lawyer for).
- pkilgore 8y ago
  > Invoice > Task. By. Rate. > -------------- > Fix form. Paralegal $ 100 > Knowing what Lawyer. $ 4,900 > form to fix.
- pkilgore 8y ago
  Honest legal Invoice Task. By. Rate. ------------------------------------ Fix form. Paralegal $ 100 Knowing what Lawyer $ 3,900 form to fix. Accepting. Firm $ 1000 liability ------------------------------------ We already live in a world where reuse of forms save clients money. True disruption changes the obvious problem above: how do you replace the cost of professional judgement and trust? If you're an engineer today, you don't get paid poorly because Mongo and Postgres already exist. You get paid well if you know whether a document store or a RDS is the best fit for the systems problem at hand based on a careers worth of experience. As someone who has done both for a living, it's shocking how much overlap there is (overlap that I assume exists in among doctors, accountants, consultants).