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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.

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.
kemitchell 6y ago
I've written code a lot longer than I've written legal text. But the longer I've written both, the less "proximate" they've seemed. Drawing parallels pleases the mind, but it's more trouble than helpful, most of the time. If you want to make legal texts even worse to read and write, throw in a heavy dose of CS-esque structuralism.
- mnahkies 6y ago
  I had the pleasure of building software requirements from legislation once and discovered that everything left room for interpretation, made what seemed on the face of it a relatively well understood thing difficult to build.
- D13Fd 6y ago
  I’ve been a coder on-and-off since the 1990’s, and an attorney for >10 years, in litigation. I actually disagree. I think legal writing is closer to programming in a lot of ways than it is to creative writing. They are all different things, but I’ve always found the parallels kind of interesting.
- borepop 6y ago
  I'm constantly repeating Justice Holmes' adage that "the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." In my opinion, non lawyers vastly overestimate the extent to which legal writing and legal argument have anything to do with logic.
FrobeniusTwist 6y ago
I'm a lawyer, and a former (and still occasional) programmer. In my experience, tools developed for (or at any rate, targeted at) lawyers seem to always be bloated, slow, and of negligible utility as far as I can tell. For "legal development" purposes (i.e., writing a letter, contract, memo, brief, etc.), nothing I've experienced surpasses plain old Word Perfect (still in use in some offices I deal with). Word's automated numbering system can burn in eternal damnation. What might be useful would be better change tracking and management. The problem here is Word's dominance as a means of exchanging drafts. When working on an agreement, I and opposing counsel usually exchange Word drafts along with PDF redlines, which works well enough. Some attorneys like to use the "Track Changes" feature of word, but after a few turns you end up with a complete mess. Still, the sophistication and power of a git or mercurial would probably be wasted in the sort of contexts in which lawyers typically work (a series of form-based documents which are individually tailored in essentially one-off transactions). I'll ignore your quip about productivity, except to note that you might feel differently if you were the one paying the fees.
- btown 6y ago
  https://draftable.com/ https://draftable.com/ https://api.draftable.com/examples https://api.draftable.com/examples is a secret weapon I've used frequently as a non-lawyer, including to silver-platter documents for counsel and to review things sent by external parties: you can give it two versions of a contract, and it automatically derives a redline, meaning that as long as you have sane file naming schemes, you essentially have `git diff` for contracts without ever needing the overhead of managing a repository. It's remarkably robust and has self-hosted options. Thinking more broadly about tools for lawyers, I feel like too many attempts have fallen into the trap of "we need to disrupt everything and remove all rote work." From the lawyers I've talked to, the common thread is that they just want better visibility and a second pair of eyes; they'll be responsible for their work product at the end of the day and will need to type changes manually, but if something could help them find the "gotcha" buried on page 93 with slightly greater speed and reliability (or, to wit, find all typos from Word's automatic numbering), without requiring a full change in toolkit, it could meaningfully improve quality of life for counsel and clients alike.
- 6y ago

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.

kemitchell 6y ago

I've written code a lot longer than I've written legal text. But the longer I've written both, the less "proximate" they've seemed. Drawing parallels pleases the mind, but it's more trouble than helpful, most of the time. If you want to make legal texts even worse to read and write, throw in a heavy dose of CS-esque structuralism.

mnahkies 6y ago
I had the pleasure of building software requirements from legislation once and discovered that everything left room for interpretation, made what seemed on the face of it a relatively well understood thing difficult to build.
D13Fd 6y ago
I’ve been a coder on-and-off since the 1990’s, and an attorney for >10 years, in litigation. I actually disagree. I think legal writing is closer to programming in a lot of ways than it is to creative writing. They are all different things, but I’ve always found the parallels kind of interesting.
borepop 6y ago
I'm constantly repeating Justice Holmes' adage that "the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." In my opinion, non lawyers vastly overestimate the extent to which legal writing and legal argument have anything to do with logic.

FrobeniusTwist 6y ago

I'm a lawyer, and a former (and still occasional) programmer. In my experience, tools developed for (or at any rate, targeted at) lawyers seem to always be bloated, slow, and of negligible utility as far as I can tell. For "legal development" purposes (i.e., writing a letter, contract, memo, brief, etc.), nothing I've experienced surpasses plain old Word Perfect (still in use in some offices I deal with). Word's automated numbering system can burn in eternal damnation. What might be useful would be better change tracking and management. The problem here is Word's dominance as a means of exchanging drafts. When working on an agreement, I and opposing counsel usually exchange Word drafts along with PDF redlines, which works well enough. Some attorneys like to use the "Track Changes" feature of word, but after a few turns you end up with a complete mess. Still, the sophistication and power of a git or mercurial would probably be wasted in the sort of contexts in which lawyers typically work (a series of form-based documents which are individually tailored in essentially one-off transactions). I'll ignore your quip about productivity, except to note that you might feel differently if you were the one paying the fees.

btown 6y ago
https://draftable.com/ https://draftable.com/ https://api.draftable.com/examples https://api.draftable.com/examples is a secret weapon I've used frequently as a non-lawyer, including to silver-platter documents for counsel and to review things sent by external parties: you can give it two versions of a contract, and it automatically derives a redline, meaning that as long as you have sane file naming schemes, you essentially have `git diff` for contracts without ever needing the overhead of managing a repository. It's remarkably robust and has self-hosted options. Thinking more broadly about tools for lawyers, I feel like too many attempts have fallen into the trap of "we need to disrupt everything and remove all rote work." From the lawyers I've talked to, the common thread is that they just want better visibility and a second pair of eyes; they'll be responsible for their work product at the end of the day and will need to type changes manually, but if something could help them find the "gotcha" buried on page 93 with slightly greater speed and reliability (or, to wit, find all typos from Word's automatic numbering), without requiring a full change in toolkit, it could meaningfully improve quality of life for counsel and clients alike.
6y ago