4 ms·

anecdotal, but my roommate is a first year lawyer. A lot of his job is taking old legal docs and updating them for new deals. This is a lot of tedious search an

anecdotal, but my roommate is a first year lawyer. A lot of his job is taking old legal docs and updating them for new deals. This is a lot of tedious search and replace and formatting in hard-to-edit PDFs. A sample scenario is one of his senior colleagues takes a PDF and writes in some comments -- almost like a teacher grading an essay with a red pen, change this x to y, etc. This goes to my friend, who reviews, edits, and returns the draft by email. And there will be a lot of back and forth, plus other people making edits in real time. watching this i can't help but notice how remarkably similar it is to programming, minus all the convenience of programming tools. i don't know what the product or barriers are here, but these people could easily 10x if they knew about version control and markup languages.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
A legal IDE. And diff-able doc formats.
- wombatpm 6y ago
  That was the strength of WordPerfect in legal areas for many years. Formatting was special codes within a document and Wordperfect could generate Black lines in the margins to indicate changed lines.
dhr 6y ago
A lot of firms still pay by the hour for such work, so there's little incentive for people to be more efficient at this. Plus for people in the first few years, there's pressure to meet a billable hour quota - work like this pads the numbers.
- travmatt 6y ago
  Justin Kan created a legal business that attempted to be more efficient than a traditional law firm, but it seems that venture folded. I’d be interested in a post-morten and if he thinks there is any innovation on the current law firm business model. https://www.techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/amp/ https://www.techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/amp/
droidno9 6y ago
If they're using PDFs, they're doing it wrong. Most law firms are fully integrated into the MS Office ecosystem. Even with emailing things back and forth, the Track Changes feature in Word does a decent enough job. (Although transactional lawyers will say it's the bane of their existence.) More advanced firms will use a document management system to save and back up documents to the cloud, and such a system usually also has built-in version control. So, the main technical problem with lawyers emailing back and forth has to do with the fact that no standard exists for the industry for document management, so these document management systems don't talk to each other. Even if the firms are using the same system, the functionality that would allow collaboration between opposing lawyers is terrible, at best. More importantly, the real barrier to innovations in the legal industry has to do with economics. Lawyers get paid by the hour, so there's almost no incentive to become more efficient. Large clients can demand efficiency in the form of slashing the final legal bill by up to 40-50% sometime. Finally, even the smallest changes introduce professional liability risks, so lawyers tend to stick to well known and understood processes that have withstood the test of time. Unless there's a concrete, nontrivial incentive for a lawyer to try something new, you're not going to find one voluntarily sticking his neck out in the name of innovation. If there's an industry that massive savings [to the client] can be had with technological innovations, the legal industry would undoubtedly be it. But for the reasons stated above, startups working in this space will run out of money long before they could introduce meaningful changes. Read up on Atrium if you want to understand more about the Tech x Legal space: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/
codingdave 6y ago
I work in this niche. I actually work a niche within this niche, and have implemented solutions. We do have a couple competitors. But most new players in this arena come in with exactly that statement - "oh, this is like programming, lets bring in markdown and git and solve all the things!" Then they realize that the level of detail and the expectations of legal document authors are far higher than they ever expected. Markdown doesn't cut it. HTML doesn't cut it. CKEditor and tinyMCE don't cut it. We spend a huge amount of effort re-writing plugins for those editors to meet the actual expectations, and defining new data formats for all the citations and interlinking of legal documents. Not that there isn't room for competition - there is. But the barriers are not what people expect. And the easy answers that coders tend to see aren't the real problems.
- tminima 6y ago
  Wouldn't LaTeX work in this situation?
- mrrobotchicken 6y ago
  How I love this comment. I do socials for CKEditor and read almost everything there is to read for WYSIWYG rich text editing, collaborating.(a little late this time)Feedback, frustrations, feature requests. I'm sad to read CKEditor doesn't cut it because I'm able to see in first hand how much effort goes into it. But I'm not surprised because I still have "I would have never guessed" moments about all the ways people use the editors myself. There is ALWAYS room for improvement when it comes to writing on web and feedback from users like you are crucial :)
mkyujung 6y ago
I'm a corporate lawyer and I've written an essay on this[1]. Contracts have surprisingly similarities to code. This means: what if the process of drafting a contract was updated to be closer to the process of building software? Definitely an opportunity here IMO. [1]mkjung.com/contracts

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

A legal IDE. And diff-able doc formats.

wombatpm 6y ago
That was the strength of WordPerfect in legal areas for many years. Formatting was special codes within a document and Wordperfect could generate Black lines in the margins to indicate changed lines.

dhr 6y ago

A lot of firms still pay by the hour for such work, so there's little incentive for people to be more efficient at this. Plus for people in the first few years, there's pressure to meet a billable hour quota - work like this pads the numbers.

travmatt 6y ago
Justin Kan created a legal business that attempted to be more efficient than a traditional law firm, but it seems that venture folded. I’d be interested in a post-morten and if he thinks there is any innovation on the current law firm business model. https://www.techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/amp/ https://www.techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/amp/

droidno9 6y ago

If they're using PDFs, they're doing it wrong. Most law firms are fully integrated into the MS Office ecosystem. Even with emailing things back and forth, the Track Changes feature in Word does a decent enough job. (Although transactional lawyers will say it's the bane of their existence.) More advanced firms will use a document management system to save and back up documents to the cloud, and such a system usually also has built-in version control. So, the main technical problem with lawyers emailing back and forth has to do with the fact that no standard exists for the industry for document management, so these document management systems don't talk to each other. Even if the firms are using the same system, the functionality that would allow collaboration between opposing lawyers is terrible, at best. More importantly, the real barrier to innovations in the legal industry has to do with economics. Lawyers get paid by the hour, so there's almost no incentive to become more efficient. Large clients can demand efficiency in the form of slashing the final legal bill by up to 40-50% sometime. Finally, even the smallest changes introduce professional liability risks, so lawyers tend to stick to well known and understood processes that have withstood the test of time. Unless there's a concrete, nontrivial incentive for a lawyer to try something new, you're not going to find one voluntarily sticking his neck out in the name of innovation. If there's an industry that massive savings [to the client] can be had with technological innovations, the legal industry would undoubtedly be it. But for the reasons stated above, startups working in this space will run out of money long before they could introduce meaningful changes. Read up on Atrium if you want to understand more about the Tech x Legal space: https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/atrium-shuts-down/

codingdave 6y ago

I work in this niche. I actually work a niche within this niche, and have implemented solutions. We do have a couple competitors. But most new players in this arena come in with exactly that statement - "oh, this is like programming, lets bring in markdown and git and solve all the things!" Then they realize that the level of detail and the expectations of legal document authors are far higher than they ever expected. Markdown doesn't cut it. HTML doesn't cut it. CKEditor and tinyMCE don't cut it. We spend a huge amount of effort re-writing plugins for those editors to meet the actual expectations, and defining new data formats for all the citations and interlinking of legal documents. Not that there isn't room for competition - there is. But the barriers are not what people expect. And the easy answers that coders tend to see aren't the real problems.

tminima 6y ago
Wouldn't LaTeX work in this situation?
mrrobotchicken 6y ago
How I love this comment. I do socials for CKEditor and read almost everything there is to read for WYSIWYG rich text editing, collaborating.(a little late this time)Feedback, frustrations, feature requests. I'm sad to read CKEditor doesn't cut it because I'm able to see in first hand how much effort goes into it. But I'm not surprised because I still have "I would have never guessed" moments about all the ways people use the editors myself. There is ALWAYS room for improvement when it comes to writing on web and feedback from users like you are crucial :)

mkyujung 6y ago

I'm a corporate lawyer and I've written an essay on this[1]. Contracts have surprisingly similarities to code. This means: what if the process of drafting a contract was updated to be closer to the process of building software? Definitely an opportunity here IMO. [1]mkjung.com/contracts