7 ms·

Templating for Lawyers

148 points by feross 6y ago

anticristi 6y ago
I recently had to sign an agreement where I had to fill my name 3 times within the agreement. It's only then that I realized that good lawyers know variables: "This agreement is signed between ... henceforth called Employee and ... henceforth called Employer."
- ct520 6y ago
  Yep - My thoughts exactly when I seen the verbiage in my court docs
- jll29 6y ago
  Yes, they even define terms in their contracts' preambles. But be very careful about capitalization (it's "Employee" if you refer to the aforementioned employee, not "employee"), a wrong lowercase initial letter, and you may lose a lot.
  - Rule35 6y ago
    Good point, but it raises the issue of checklists. If this area is too dangerous to tweak, how do you take care to avoid manual versions of these mistakes? Is there a step to search for words in the wrong case? Usually you'll find that the new idea is good, in some contexts, but that exploring it surfaces new requirements and existing ones that were poorly understood. Usually there are things that aren't being done correctly now, that when documented and planned for, change the equation. But the big benefit of outsiders isn't their ideas (though it often is), it's their ability to help cut through the insider problems. Usually insiders know what to do but are hampered by not only the difficulties, but the politics. Someone who doesn't know the conflicts can say that the emperor is naked, that doesn't magically clothe him but allows the tailor's who've been calling it out already to actually be heard and then the problem can actually be corrected.
  - pseingatl 6y ago
    No kidding. What's worse is when you capitalize defined terms but then have to translate the contract into a language that has no capital letters, like Arabic, Korean or Thai.
- kemitchell 6y ago
  I tend to start my contacts like "Vendor and Customer agree: ..." and then add "Vendor" and "Customer" tags to the signature pages at the back. There's really no reason to be repeating nicknames, legal entity names, jurisdictions of incorporation, addresses, and the like all over a contract.
- catillac 6y ago
  I’m not a coder but a designer, but I also have some experience in this space. This is also one of those areas where the HN crowd will think, “I’m so much smarter they should just do X isn’t it obvious?” What happens is that clauses are often litigated over and over and the successful evolution of the clauses that survive court battles and arbitration are then used wholesale in future contracts because the law is so settled. So it’s hard to change clauses, even to replace some small things with seemingly equal things (names vs variables in this case) because that opens up cans of worms because the clause is no longer identical to the litigated one. So the efficiency gained by only needing to write your name once is lost in the danger of additional litigation. One analogy would be to not roll your own crypto. You may think you got it right, but better to just go with the battle tested solution. This is also one of the many reasons people incorporate in Delaware primarily. The law is settled and doesn’t change, people can rely on it, so they use the clauses that were litigated and have settled meanings for decades.
  - Rule35 6y ago
    You're not saying that the new idea wouldn't be right, but that there could be complexities the outsider would miss. I don't think anyone would disagree. But variables vs rewritten names (for example) would still be the right idea, it's just that the body of existing work hampers agile changes. The way to deal with this is write the idea down with the blockers and benefits and work to enable it slowly. For instance, forgetting one of the three signatures needed would similarly doom you, so it's not all risk, it's also reward. Almost any consultant deals with this constantly, in any industry.
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    Can you explain why name vs variable would matter? I could totally see this for other seemingly small changes, but name vs variable doesn't change the meaning at all.
- torstenvl 6y ago
  Sometimes having you do something manually is part of the point. Areas of legal risk or when you're acting against your own interests are areas where the attorney might want to draw extra attention. Think of it as an "Are you sure?" dialog. An example: when I was doing basic legal assistance, we had a lot of folks who wanted a power of attorney. Many of them insisted on getting a general power of attorney. There are significant risks that such an instrument may be too powerful, and also that it may not be powerful enough. Eventually, we had a disclaimer on the back of the request form that they had to rewrite, by hand, before we would draft the instrument for execution.
  - PebblesRox 6y ago
    I'm curious to hear more about the affect of adding the disclaimer. Did it mean fewer people put in the request? Did it prompt them to ask more questions? Did it replace in-person discussions of the significance of the decision? I'd love to hear more details of how the change played out.
    - torstenvl 6y ago
      Fewer people ended up requesting them. It was common knowledge that they can be abused, so when we would explain the risks people would tune us out and their eyes would glaze over and they would insist. By making them rewrite by hand that there's also a risk that different companies and agencies will refuse to honor them, they finally understand that the risks are not just theoretical, but practical.
evolve2k 6y ago
In a case of hidden issues in plain sight; your first markdown example, speaks of what the # means but ignore the leading # being used to signifiy a header in markdown. Make sense to me as a coder, but I expect non-coders will be left confused as the # obviously does important things and yet there’s an extra one there that’s unexplained (that does header markup). Consider removing the header all together for the sake of simplified grokking.
- anticristi 6y ago
  I'm a coder and I still struggle to "see through layers". Imagine seeing the following in Ansible: shell: > cat {{ item }} | grep ansible echo $USER with_items: - hello.txt - hello2.txt - hello3.txt You essentially look at 4 layers (YAML, Ansible, Jinja, Shell) and need to "run them in your brain" in the correct order.
- kemitchell 6y ago
  My first paragraph mentions Markdown. My first link leads to https://type.commonform.org/ https://type.commonform.org/. Markdown first. Then Mustache on top of Markdown.
  - evolve2k 6y ago
    I get that. Ask your non-coder mate to read the article over.. thinking it’s a tricky double logic point.. You’re teaching us about # but # has two meanings inside ur short example. My suggestion, let them learn about headings elsewhere and simplify your example. It’s not for real word use anyway. 2 cents. Nice article
  - spiralx 6y ago
    Hah, our legal document templates are a combination of Pug for document structure with features from Markdown for text formatting and Handlebars for variable formatting.
choeger 6y ago
With the proximity of legal text and computer code, I always wondered how big a market lawyers are for pretty standard programming language tools and services. At the same time I am not so sure whether we should bring said tools and services to lawyers because they increase productivity so immensely...
- grosswait 6y ago
  I can’t figure out how to reply at the top level, but if this sort of thing interest you, take a look at Docassemble
- ianeliot 6y ago
  I can speak to this a bit. My mom is a lawyer and we've talked before about the need for better templating systems. The problem is that the market for solo practitioners and small firms is just not that large or lucrative, and AIUI the market for large law firms is already pretty mature, or at least there's a high barrier to entry. But there's definitely a need among solo practitioners and small firms, and that need goes beyond templating to include better ways of organizing documents, automating workflows, ensuring security, and so forth. There are companies like Practice Panther which are trying to do this, but the problem I've seen with them is they encourage vendor lock-in and make it hard to do anything not officially supported by the platform.
  - howtowin 6y ago
    I don’t know if you have started working on a potential solution (I am assuming not based off your verbiage), but I’d love to hear more. I find tremendous purpose and joy in enabling more productive and efficient work by developing digital tools & applications, especially for intelligent individuals such as your mother and other lawyers. If interested in sharing more, whether you want to have nothing to do with a potential venture or not, I have my public email on my profile. Cheers!
- hctaw 6y ago
  Someone can come out with it and then someone will wrap a dashboard around it and advertise it as "look - you don't even have to write code!" The biggest enemy of programming languages as general purpose tools for business is the idea that code == hard, and coder == expensive specialized labor. If we reach a point where programming is taught as a basic skill like arithmetic or writing then maybe we can apply standard PL tools to basic business tasks.
WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
Yeah, I've recommended https://docassemble.org/ https://docassemble.org/ to a lot of friends in the lawyer space. They use it a lot to generate some automate template software.
- howtowin 6y ago
  By any chance, have any of your friends shared any notable shortfalls of - or annoyances with - Docassemble?
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    I have had one small thing with it, if you're using the realtime preview for fancy things (one friend used it for a self-managed invitation card thing for weddings), the preview does not use the fancy fonts that are loaded into your template. It's weird because the rest of the ecosystem is very good for almost every usecase.
kderbyma 6y ago
latex is also great for this.It is fully Turing complete and I have used it extensively for building programmatic templates.
froh42 6y ago
Heh, my father was a Lawyer. He kept using Word (the MS-DOS Version!) for a very very long time, because he had most of the everyday stuff he needed as predefined "Textbausteine" (text modules? text blocks?) - he would just press ESC-this-key,that-key and a complete divorce application for the court would pop up. Many paragraphs were double, so he only had to delete the male/female version. He was bragging the "work" he did for a divorce was around 10 minutes, the rest of the time he was chatting with the client. (He also had several boxes of Kleenex around for crying clients - a big part of that work is emotional). He also had a lot of text modules for all the other bread-and-butter stuff that turns up every day.
btown 6y ago
In the same way that Markdown compiles to HTML which is then interpreted by web browsers into pixels on a screen, I find it fascinating to consider the logical next step: the runtime environment in which "legal code" runs. A contract is really a function of (world state) -> (booleans for parties in breach), and lawyers excel at traversing the function space of possible contracts based on simulations of possible world states, making them optimizers over those function spaces. Their "speculative execution" and ability to cull parts of that search space are based on having efficient caches of case law; we literally train lawyers to be optimal caches by having them take bar examinations, because even with databases at these professionals' fingertips, the latency with which they can simulate contract space given novel information (in trial, in live conversations with clients) is a core competency of the profession. I wonder if some of the tooling and philosophies being developed in the machine learning world can be applied to great effect in this context...
- willio58 6y ago
  Do it with Ethereum. Have the U.S. government create the smart contracts. What's stopping this now?
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    Because literally the only step that's been taken in that direction is that Ethereum exists?
  - qznc 6y ago
    Who said anything about blockchain? It is one thing to formalize contracts as functions. Also formalizing the world state is a much harder problem and Ethereum tries to solve it by declaring the blockchain "the world". This is the harder problem as you can observe in courts where nearly all the discussion is about the world state. For an example, the question might be "murder" vs "manslaughter". Was there malice? This is about the world state. Once that is decided, the function to determine the sentence is relatively quick to compute.
  - crooked-v 6y ago
    > What's stopping this now? Well, to start with, a judge who decides that part of your contract is invalid for one reason or another isn't going to care about your claims that it's impossible to alter because blockchain.
arrenv 6y ago
We have been working on this to a degree with our new platform, along with other layers of the agreement process. We are mostly focusing on contracts for digital agencies (and their clients and suppliers) to begin with, with templates based on services being delivered, deliverable signoffs, variation handling, and recurring agreement elements.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Templating has a very long history in law: law firms were strongholds of WordPerfect against MS Word due to WP's non-WYSIWYG, macro/batch-friendly nature, and insurance companies used and still use SGML (SCRIPT/VS, DCF, GML on z/OS) for printing customized contracts and account statements. Early full-text databases for cases and annotations etc. also evolved in law. SGML in particular allows full markdown and custom notational conventions for referencing legal code/precedents without resorting to ad-hoc template "engines"; it was even designed by a lawyer.
faitswulff 6y ago
See also: “Brexit deal mentions Netscape browser and Mozilla Mail” https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55475433 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55475433
hugocbp 6y ago
This is such a cool idea. As an ex-lawyer turned developer, I wish I had thought of that. In my career, I probably wrote 1000+ corporate contracts, but most of those were about +/- 8 types of contracts with 80% of clauses repeated. Me (before knowing programming) and most organized lawyers I know, just had a huge "Clause Database Word File" where we dumped common clauses that we just copy/pasted when building new contracts. I believe there are a lot of opportunities to make software for lawyers that automate those things. I'm glad I made the transition to programming, but it would have been awesome to know those tricks when I was write dozens of those contracts every week.
raleighm 6y ago
Cicero by the Accord Project is an attempt at this. Machine-readable markup language for contracting. https://accordproject.org/projects/cicero https://accordproject.org/projects/cicero
christianhpoe 6y ago
I´m a law graduate and a product manager in the legal space at the moment, so this is very interesting to me. Templating is a solved problem in general and there are many ways to achieve the same thing, some startups are build simply on the premise that a nice frontend for a templating engine will be a huge value. But I think in order to create meaningful change for legal professionals, you need more components. 1. Knowledge management a. privat knowledge b. public knowledge like laws 2. Templating 3. Insights in the combination of 1. and 2. 4. Results that look equally good as custom build contracts in Word 5. A link to reference code, if there is code enforcing the legal prosa Its all about knowledge graphs and an interface to them.
jdmcnugent 6y ago
We encounter a similar problem in the medical field: endless clinic and operative notes that are 95% repetitive but are critically important for recording medical care, medicolegal defense, and payment for the work done. There are surprisingly few commercial options out there (the ones included with EMR's suck) and I finally ended up making my own op-note templating program in python with pysimplegui that generates and submits a pdf so my op-notes take 20-30 seconds instead.
spiralx 6y ago
Our legal team code most of our documents in a hybrid of Pug, Markdown and Handlebars which works for us - it also supports automatic sectioning as well. This works well for the general case where documents are generated from question sets defined in JSON, developer time is required when the documents need to use something more complex - modelling a cap table, the vesting schedule for an option grant, convertible loans etc.

148 points by feross 6y ago

I recently had to sign an agreement where I had to fill my name 3 times within the agreement. It's only then that I realized that good lawyers know variables: "This agreement is signed between ... henceforth called Employee and ... henceforth called Employer."

ct520 6y ago
Yep - My thoughts exactly when I seen the verbiage in my court docs
jll29 6y ago
Yes, they even define terms in their contracts' preambles. But be very careful about capitalization (it's "Employee" if you refer to the aforementioned employee, not "employee"), a wrong lowercase initial letter, and you may lose a lot.
- Rule35 6y ago
  Good point, but it raises the issue of checklists. If this area is too dangerous to tweak, how do you take care to avoid manual versions of these mistakes? Is there a step to search for words in the wrong case? Usually you'll find that the new idea is good, in some contexts, but that exploring it surfaces new requirements and existing ones that were poorly understood. Usually there are things that aren't being done correctly now, that when documented and planned for, change the equation. But the big benefit of outsiders isn't their ideas (though it often is), it's their ability to help cut through the insider problems. Usually insiders know what to do but are hampered by not only the difficulties, but the politics. Someone who doesn't know the conflicts can say that the emperor is naked, that doesn't magically clothe him but allows the tailor's who've been calling it out already to actually be heard and then the problem can actually be corrected.
- pseingatl 6y ago
  No kidding. What's worse is when you capitalize defined terms but then have to translate the contract into a language that has no capital letters, like Arabic, Korean or Thai.
kemitchell 6y ago
I tend to start my contacts like "Vendor and Customer agree: ..." and then add "Vendor" and "Customer" tags to the signature pages at the back. There's really no reason to be repeating nicknames, legal entity names, jurisdictions of incorporation, addresses, and the like all over a contract.
catillac 6y ago
I’m not a coder but a designer, but I also have some experience in this space. This is also one of those areas where the HN crowd will think, “I’m so much smarter they should just do X isn’t it obvious?” What happens is that clauses are often litigated over and over and the successful evolution of the clauses that survive court battles and arbitration are then used wholesale in future contracts because the law is so settled. So it’s hard to change clauses, even to replace some small things with seemingly equal things (names vs variables in this case) because that opens up cans of worms because the clause is no longer identical to the litigated one. So the efficiency gained by only needing to write your name once is lost in the danger of additional litigation. One analogy would be to not roll your own crypto. You may think you got it right, but better to just go with the battle tested solution. This is also one of the many reasons people incorporate in Delaware primarily. The law is settled and doesn’t change, people can rely on it, so they use the clauses that were litigated and have settled meanings for decades.
- Rule35 6y ago
  You're not saying that the new idea wouldn't be right, but that there could be complexities the outsider would miss. I don't think anyone would disagree. But variables vs rewritten names (for example) would still be the right idea, it's just that the body of existing work hampers agile changes. The way to deal with this is write the idea down with the blockers and benefits and work to enable it slowly. For instance, forgetting one of the three signatures needed would similarly doom you, so it's not all risk, it's also reward. Almost any consultant deals with this constantly, in any industry.
- ma2rten 6y ago
  Can you explain why name vs variable would matter? I could totally see this for other seemingly small changes, but name vs variable doesn't change the meaning at all.
torstenvl 6y ago
Sometimes having you do something manually is part of the point. Areas of legal risk or when you're acting against your own interests are areas where the attorney might want to draw extra attention. Think of it as an "Are you sure?" dialog. An example: when I was doing basic legal assistance, we had a lot of folks who wanted a power of attorney. Many of them insisted on getting a general power of attorney. There are significant risks that such an instrument may be too powerful, and also that it may not be powerful enough. Eventually, we had a disclaimer on the back of the request form that they had to rewrite, by hand, before we would draft the instrument for execution.
- PebblesRox 6y ago
  I'm curious to hear more about the affect of adding the disclaimer. Did it mean fewer people put in the request? Did it prompt them to ask more questions? Did it replace in-person discussions of the significance of the decision? I'd love to hear more details of how the change played out.
  - torstenvl 6y ago
    Fewer people ended up requesting them. It was common knowledge that they can be abused, so when we would explain the risks people would tune us out and their eyes would glaze over and they would insist. By making them rewrite by hand that there's also a risk that different companies and agencies will refuse to honor them, they finally understand that the risks are not just theoretical, but practical.

evolve2k 6y ago

In a case of hidden issues in plain sight; your first markdown example, speaks of what the # means but ignore the leading # being used to signifiy a header in markdown. Make sense to me as a coder, but I expect non-coders will be left confused as the # obviously does important things and yet there’s an extra one there that’s unexplained (that does header markup). Consider removing the header all together for the sake of simplified grokking.

anticristi 6y ago
I'm a coder and I still struggle to "see through layers". Imagine seeing the following in Ansible: shell: > cat {{ item }} | grep ansible echo $USER with_items: - hello.txt - hello2.txt - hello3.txt You essentially look at 4 layers (YAML, Ansible, Jinja, Shell) and need to "run them in your brain" in the correct order.
kemitchell 6y ago
My first paragraph mentions Markdown. My first link leads to https://type.commonform.org/ https://type.commonform.org/. Markdown first. Then Mustache on top of Markdown.
- evolve2k 6y ago
  I get that. Ask your non-coder mate to read the article over.. thinking it’s a tricky double logic point.. You’re teaching us about # but # has two meanings inside ur short example. My suggestion, let them learn about headings elsewhere and simplify your example. It’s not for real word use anyway. 2 cents. Nice article
- spiralx 6y ago
  Hah, our legal document templates are a combination of Pug for document structure with features from Markdown for text formatting and Handlebars for variable formatting.

choeger 6y ago

With the proximity of legal text and computer code, I always wondered how big a market lawyers are for pretty standard programming language tools and services. At the same time I am not so sure whether we should bring said tools and services to lawyers because they increase productivity so immensely...

grosswait 6y ago
I can’t figure out how to reply at the top level, but if this sort of thing interest you, take a look at Docassemble
ianeliot 6y ago
I can speak to this a bit. My mom is a lawyer and we've talked before about the need for better templating systems. The problem is that the market for solo practitioners and small firms is just not that large or lucrative, and AIUI the market for large law firms is already pretty mature, or at least there's a high barrier to entry. But there's definitely a need among solo practitioners and small firms, and that need goes beyond templating to include better ways of organizing documents, automating workflows, ensuring security, and so forth. There are companies like Practice Panther which are trying to do this, but the problem I've seen with them is they encourage vendor lock-in and make it hard to do anything not officially supported by the platform.
- howtowin 6y ago
  I don’t know if you have started working on a potential solution (I am assuming not based off your verbiage), but I’d love to hear more. I find tremendous purpose and joy in enabling more productive and efficient work by developing digital tools & applications, especially for intelligent individuals such as your mother and other lawyers. If interested in sharing more, whether you want to have nothing to do with a potential venture or not, I have my public email on my profile. Cheers!
hctaw 6y ago
Someone can come out with it and then someone will wrap a dashboard around it and advertise it as "look - you don't even have to write code!" The biggest enemy of programming languages as general purpose tools for business is the idea that code == hard, and coder == expensive specialized labor. If we reach a point where programming is taught as a basic skill like arithmetic or writing then maybe we can apply standard PL tools to basic business tasks.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

Yeah, I've recommended https://docassemble.org/ https://docassemble.org/ to a lot of friends in the lawyer space. They use it a lot to generate some automate template software.

howtowin 6y ago
By any chance, have any of your friends shared any notable shortfalls of - or annoyances with - Docassemble?
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  I have had one small thing with it, if you're using the realtime preview for fancy things (one friend used it for a self-managed invitation card thing for weddings), the preview does not use the fancy fonts that are loaded into your template. It's weird because the rest of the ecosystem is very good for almost every usecase.

kderbyma 6y ago

latex is also great for this.It is fully Turing complete and I have used it extensively for building programmatic templates.

froh42 6y ago

Heh, my father was a Lawyer. He kept using Word (the MS-DOS Version!) for a very very long time, because he had most of the everyday stuff he needed as predefined "Textbausteine" (text modules? text blocks?) - he would just press ESC-this-key,that-key and a complete divorce application for the court would pop up. Many paragraphs were double, so he only had to delete the male/female version. He was bragging the "work" he did for a divorce was around 10 minutes, the rest of the time he was chatting with the client. (He also had several boxes of Kleenex around for crying clients - a big part of that work is emotional). He also had a lot of text modules for all the other bread-and-butter stuff that turns up every day.

btown 6y ago

In the same way that Markdown compiles to HTML which is then interpreted by web browsers into pixels on a screen, I find it fascinating to consider the logical next step: the runtime environment in which "legal code" runs. A contract is really a function of (world state) -> (booleans for parties in breach), and lawyers excel at traversing the function space of possible contracts based on simulations of possible world states, making them optimizers over those function spaces. Their "speculative execution" and ability to cull parts of that search space are based on having efficient caches of case law; we literally train lawyers to be optimal caches by having them take bar examinations, because even with databases at these professionals' fingertips, the latency with which they can simulate contract space given novel information (in trial, in live conversations with clients) is a core competency of the profession. I wonder if some of the tooling and philosophies being developed in the machine learning world can be applied to great effect in this context...

willio58 6y ago
Do it with Ethereum. Have the U.S. government create the smart contracts. What's stopping this now?
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  Because literally the only step that's been taken in that direction is that Ethereum exists?
- qznc 6y ago
  Who said anything about blockchain? It is one thing to formalize contracts as functions. Also formalizing the world state is a much harder problem and Ethereum tries to solve it by declaring the blockchain "the world". This is the harder problem as you can observe in courts where nearly all the discussion is about the world state. For an example, the question might be "murder" vs "manslaughter". Was there malice? This is about the world state. Once that is decided, the function to determine the sentence is relatively quick to compute.
- crooked-v 6y ago
  > What's stopping this now? Well, to start with, a judge who decides that part of your contract is invalid for one reason or another isn't going to care about your claims that it's impossible to alter because blockchain.

arrenv 6y ago

We have been working on this to a degree with our new platform, along with other layers of the agreement process. We are mostly focusing on contracts for digital agencies (and their clients and suppliers) to begin with, with templates based on services being delivered, deliverable signoffs, variation handling, and recurring agreement elements.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Templating has a very long history in law: law firms were strongholds of WordPerfect against MS Word due to WP's non-WYSIWYG, macro/batch-friendly nature, and insurance companies used and still use SGML (SCRIPT/VS, DCF, GML on z/OS) for printing customized contracts and account statements. Early full-text databases for cases and annotations etc. also evolved in law. SGML in particular allows full markdown and custom notational conventions for referencing legal code/precedents without resorting to ad-hoc template "engines"; it was even designed by a lawyer.

faitswulff 6y ago

See also: “Brexit deal mentions Netscape browser and Mozilla Mail” https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55475433 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55475433

hugocbp 6y ago

This is such a cool idea. As an ex-lawyer turned developer, I wish I had thought of that. In my career, I probably wrote 1000+ corporate contracts, but most of those were about +/- 8 types of contracts with 80% of clauses repeated. Me (before knowing programming) and most organized lawyers I know, just had a huge "Clause Database Word File" where we dumped common clauses that we just copy/pasted when building new contracts. I believe there are a lot of opportunities to make software for lawyers that automate those things. I'm glad I made the transition to programming, but it would have been awesome to know those tricks when I was write dozens of those contracts every week.

raleighm 6y ago

Cicero by the Accord Project is an attempt at this. Machine-readable markup language for contracting. https://accordproject.org/projects/cicero https://accordproject.org/projects/cicero

christianhpoe 6y ago

I´m a law graduate and a product manager in the legal space at the moment, so this is very interesting to me. Templating is a solved problem in general and there are many ways to achieve the same thing, some startups are build simply on the premise that a nice frontend for a templating engine will be a huge value. But I think in order to create meaningful change for legal professionals, you need more components. 1. Knowledge management a. privat knowledge b. public knowledge like laws 2. Templating 3. Insights in the combination of 1. and 2. 4. Results that look equally good as custom build contracts in Word 5. A link to reference code, if there is code enforcing the legal prosa Its all about knowledge graphs and an interface to them.

jdmcnugent 6y ago

We encounter a similar problem in the medical field: endless clinic and operative notes that are 95% repetitive but are critically important for recording medical care, medicolegal defense, and payment for the work done. There are surprisingly few commercial options out there (the ones included with EMR's suck) and I finally ended up making my own op-note templating program in python with pysimplegui that generates and submits a pdf so my op-notes take 20-30 seconds instead.

spiralx 6y ago

Our legal team code most of our documents in a hybrid of Pug, Markdown and Handlebars which works for us - it also supports automatic sectioning as well. This works well for the general case where documents are generated from question sets defined in JSON, developer time is required when the documents need to use something more complex - modelling a cap table, the vesting schedule for an option grant, convertible loans etc.