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Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex. It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that

Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex. It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff. It's basically impossible to read the docs for all the services you buy, and even if you did you wouldn't know what it meant in terms of law. Yet we have lawyers talking through the technical minutiae as if they are source code. There's a huge disconnect between what people understand their rights and legal positions to be, and what the lawyers can turn it into. There's other problems as well. At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity. This leads to all sorts of problems with who gets justice. Then there's the money. If we're all equal before the law, how can there be lawyers who cost thousands an hour? Either they're more effective than other lawyers, in which case we're not all equal under the law, or they're just as good as any other lawyer, in which case they are just good marketers. I'm sure it's a mix of both, but if we cared that everyone had equal access, why wouldn't there simply be a big bench of lawyers from which you get assigned one? The legal system has somehow managed to both be a social good and a tremendous source of profit for its members. (Well, some of its members, they don't all make piles of cash.)

noduerme 5y ago
The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking. It's no different than being a victim of dark pattern software practices, which you would be if you didn't know how to code. (Ironically, part of my slot involves helping lawyers get around pitfalls in software).
- chaosite 5y ago
  Dark patterns in software usually involve UI/UX, so knowing to code doesn't really help with those. On the other hand, being able to code an app might be enough to make someone go "why is it like that? I know it doesn't have to be!" in response to a dark pattern.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Yes. This is what I meant. Experience in code lets you see dark patterns quickly in software. Experience in law lets you see them in _everything_.
- cbozeman 5y ago
  This is a stupid answer. And I don't mean it's ignorant, I mean it's stupid. The answer to a problem cannot be, "Become a subject matter expert in that field." You don't understand the problem with your small intestine? Become a gastroenterologist. No thanks. Society has to be built on trust to function. Yes, we've allowed for an enormous amount of trust to be eroded in the Western world, but that's over now. We either make the hard choices to rebuild these institutions or we see the long slow miserable collapse of our society.
  - panta 5y ago
    I don't think it's a stupid answer. Maybe too extreme, but I believe it contains some elements of truth. Trust has been largely eroded by greed, corruption and incompetence, and if one counts only on trust is probably going to get the short end of the stick. As a matter of fact, when you "outsource" some activity, you need some non-zero amount of competence in the outsourced field to be able to evaluate the level of service and avoid terrible outcomes. This is sadly true even when you go to a gastroenterologist.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      "Too extreme" is putting it mildly. Most people couldn't even afford to go to law school. A great many wouldn't have the spare time to study another specialty and a lot might not even be capable of competently understanding the material even if they did go to law school (we all have our strengths and weaknesses after all. For example I'd be a hopeless doctor, chef or teacher). And that's before you've factored in that you also need to keep on top of any new case studies and changes in legislation else risk your knowledge becoming irreverent. In short, if it were that easy then more people would do it since the kind of jobs it unlocks generally pays pretty well (easily above the national average).
    - lordnacho 5y ago
      I think it's impolite to label the original answer stupid, he seems to have taken time to at least think about it, and we should keep a civil tone here. However, I agree with the guy who called it stupid. Not in calling it stupid, but in that it's an answer that creates more questions than it answers. You could nuance it and take the steelman version, which is that everyone should be generally educated and know a bit about everything, but we all know it's unrealistic. You can't do part of an actuarial degree so that you understand insurance. But you have to buy insurance. You can't flip through a psychology intro so that you can be prepared when you see a therapist. Or read DS&A so that you can hire a programmer. Or read about structures for when you buy a house, or learn to play the piano so you can enjoy music. You just can't do all these things to a degree where you are covered everywhere. Now the problem with certain fields is they reach into everyone's lives to a significant degree. Law is one of those, medicine is another, and finance is yet another. So you can't even narrow it down to "do these things only", because you can't become an expert in multiple broad fields like that. The only realistic answer is to known a tiny bit about a bunch of things, and a lot about one "thing" and then rely on social institutions to make sure you get what you're due when interacting with experts in other fields.
- lostlogin 5y ago
  Does that mean that everyone on HN should have a computer science degree, a marketing degree and an MBA?
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Don't forget the medical degree so you can "do your own research", and the mechanic qualifications so you can avoid being scammed when it comes to fixing your car.
  - laichzeit0 5y ago
    At least have a degree in cryptography so you can verify your random number generator is cryptographically secure. A trivial task for the average HN reader, except the greatest impediment being that mathematics is impenetrable largely because of the obscure notation that mathematicians use when writing it.
    - tomrod 5y ago
      This is like complaining that code syntax is inscrutable because someone hasn't taken the time to learn it. While it may be difficult to access without some time spent on it, mathematical symbology avoids massive verbosity.
- rovr138 5y ago
  My "hack" around this is, have a friend that's a lawyer. I lucked out in that we had been friends before. I have answered many development and programming questions and issues for them, and they have for me too. To others commenting, I guess it's about having trust in others and using that. We have friends and family that are in CS, accounting, law, medicine, etc. What we don't have, we pay for. Find a good resource and pay them. I guess this goes back to the grandparent post were they talk about access and costs of different lawyers.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    That's the right hack in a lot of cases. Where would we be without friends who know more than we do about these things? But those friends also educate themselves in a lot of fields - and they know what they are or aren't qualified to answer. So if I ask a friend who's a graphics guy about lighting he can help me, but he'll point me to someone better. Or if I ask family members about a specific legal thing, they'll refer me to someone more specialized in a particular form of law. Nothing wrong with that. It's more like: I need to know enough at least to tell whether I'm being bullshitted or not; I trust my friends to know enough to tell me if they can't fully answer my question. But there is nowhere in that chain where knowing more isn't valuable.
- atoav 5y ago
  It saddens me that such a great part of US society (as I perceive it from the outside) has basically given up on fixing any systemic problem at all. Be it small things like robocalls, or bigger things like a broken healthcare system, gun violence, lobbying in politics or things like the housing/opiod crisis — a big part of the US people I talk to have basically given up on any collective way of fixing these issues and just try to shield themselves individually from the consequences and risks. The summed up individual time, nerve and energy spent on this must easily outweigh the time, nerve and energy it would cost to fix these issues collectively. Sometimes I even have the feeling that some people like hurdles like these because they believe it gives them some kind of "edge" in the competition with others — a bit like in the 30-year-war where at some point people had adapted to the war so much, they didn't want it to end, because they were a little less worse off than their peers — they had forgotten how much better off they could be if there was peace.
  - jeffreygoesto 5y ago
    What makes you think that these are systemic _problems_? Maybe they _are_ the system? SCNR. I am completely with you. There is a good deal of acquired helplessness involved where small deviations from that "system" are always are conceived as degressions, so the system can not be questioned in general. Wait for the "but capitalism is the best we could come up with so far" arguments to arrive. They are not completely wrong and part of the game...
  - sdoering 5y ago
    As a total outsider my first instinct was to agree. Then I thought about aspects in my country (Germany) and thought that while not so obvious and blatant we have basically the same problems. And they grow year over year. Let's take the example that the public prosecutor's office is bound by the instructions of the Ministry of Justice. Let us now assume that someone files charges against two politicians on the (justified) suspicion of supporting tax evasion by banks, and let us assume that these politicians now hold very prominent positions in the country. How would the public prosecutor's office react? Exactly. The initial suspicion necessary for an investigation is denied. Despite demonstrable false statements made by the politicians in question before parliamentary investigative committees. There are also regular rulings by the Hamburg court (think Delaware) regarding copyright, addblockers and the like. Here, too, the individual can do nothing. Because the system is not made to allow such influence of individuals. The elected representatives have gone through years of party school. Polished smoothly. Streamlined. Who questions things or acts in the sense of the people will find no place on the list to be elected. Who wants to found an own party must do a lot and will fail in the vast majority of cases because you need 5% of the votes to be represented at all in parliament. Demonstrations, petitions and the like have not changed anything for a long time. Imho we live in a corporate democracy. Not a democracy that represents any "people". So the rational thing to do is to stop caring and to "only" protect one's own personal life and that of one's loved ones.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"The answer according to my family: Get a law degree" Form your own country and become a president.
  - pc86 5y ago
    As useful a suggestion, but at least this one was funny.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  If that's their response, then you should also expect them to get a computer science degree every time MS Word shows a vague popup and every time their OS hides or changes the way it works, or every time a major software update breaks existing functionality. I'm sure it would make the lives of whoever manages their IT a lot easier if they can just expect the lawyers to go through a few more years of college. You can just blindly deploy updates, assume everybody uses the communicated backup plan and put the full blame on the lawyers if they get hacked because they use a crappy password. Sysadmin heaven!
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  > The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking We can't have a functional society like this: by the time i am done getting a law degree, a software degree, a finance degree (massive dark pattern there), medical degree , etc - i will be 60 and millions in debt. In a functional society you rely on the rest of society to get things roughly correct, and to not defraud you every step. Adopt the dog-eats-dog view of the world, and you will get basically russia - spciety ruled by fraud and violence, with mafia boss at the helm
  - noduerme 5y ago
    I'd counter that if you expect people to handle all your legal issues, your software issues, your financial issues and your medical issues, without a solid understanding of any of those fields, you're also going to spend (and likely waste) a lot of money h and be less effective than if you knew what was going on. Of those things you mentioned, only the law degree is useful when dealing with issues that arise in all of the others.
    - otterley 5y ago
      The statistics don’t support your assertion. Most people aren’t lawyers, and the median amount of money a person spends on legal counsel is pretty low.
      - noduerme 5y ago
        The question in any given area you outsource to experts isn't how much you spend, but what percentage you waste as a result of lacking domain specific knowledge. For instance, I'm not a good auto mechanic, let alone an expert. But I've read my car's factory service manual end to end, and looked up a lot of what I didn't understand. I don't usually have to ask a mechanic what's wrong, but if a mechanic tells me something I understand what they're talking about and what it should cost, and thus, I might pay $1000 for a job where someone else would pay $3000. Having as much domain specific knowledge as you can is always a good thing. That's the point. Building wealth is not about refraining from spending money. It's about getting what your money is worth without getting scammed.
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  This is one of those answers that will get written up about in the New Yorker. Clearly the most logical answer for this audience…
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Apparently it wasn't that well taken. Is the New Yorker accepting submissions from roundly rejected HN commenters these days? I've always wanted to caption one of those cartoons. "Yes, my accountant always does his business in the bushes". That sorta thing.
pydry 5y ago
>At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity. This isnt a problem startups can, nor should they solve. It requires political will.
- kergonath 5y ago
  > This isnt a problem startups can, nor should they solve. It requires political will. Indeed. I really don’t want any tech bro to come and disrupt the legal framework, move fast and break things. It’s probably not the last thing I want, but quite close. I’d rather work under an imperfect legal system than be at the whim of another sociopathic arsehole.
pjc50 5y ago
> At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity Yeah, that's a political decision; the government is so anti-public service that it's cut it to disastrous levels. In many cases the cuts to legal aid are politically targeted at situations where the government was losing too many cases.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Political/funding decisions are part of the mix, but I don't think the daylight between highly funded and underfunded amounts to fundamental difference. Courts are extremely costly and/or low throughput. The vast majority of legal resolutions happen outside of courts, whether or not they even touch a court along the way. It just is not designed for efficiency. Court systems are designed to embody legal ideals (and imo myths) of justice, that may be pretty far from common sense ideals. We basically can't have a decent court system unless appealing to it is extremely rare. This is the nature of the legal system, not a consequence of details like funding.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Courts don’t actually need to deal with vary many cases though. I suspect the average person needs to deal with the legal system for anything more complex than a speeding ticket less than once per decade. And as it turns out five minutes in front of a judge can easily handle: “The speed camera is showing a picture of a pickup truck, I drive an SUV.” It’s only a minute fraction of cases that take significant time to resolve. The UK has ~700 homicide victims per year and significantly fewer murder trials. Individual trials can be long and expensive without it actually adding up to a significant expense.
    - aardvark179 5y ago
      So, looking at stats for England and Wales about 80% of homicide incidents result in one or more suspects being charged and a small number of those end up being acquitted (though it often takes some time for people to be charged). I guess that counts as significantly fewer, but wasn’t the impression I got from my initial reading of your post.
makeitdouble 5y ago
> It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff. I think incredibly long EULAs would be fine if violation on technicalities were lighter, and/or critical sections were put on top, in plain language. For instance, I wouldn't care much about Youtube's terms and services outside of what would warrant an account ban, and what's the privacy boundaries. If Google had a clause to change my name to a random "white_dove_mud_pond-24523424" like string every time I include excrement related words in a comment, I probably wouldn't care much, they can hide it where they want. If instead it was a banning offense, I'd want it in the first 10 lines in big red bold letters. Failure to make it prominent should be ground for voiding critical clauses. On the other extreme, I assume people actually sit for 20 min and read 30+ pages of contract verbiage when they're buying a house. IMHO there needs to be a proportionality between the time to spend on checking it and the consequences for not doing so.
- mjevans 5y ago
  Respectfully; No. A standard library of terms, preferably from the highest (and thus widest covering) level of government, should be the bulk and basis of all widely common contracts. I shouldn't have to re-read 40+ pages when I renew my dwelling's rental lease for another year; this should not be one more thing that has to be shopped around for. Don't provide an illusion of choice (as if we the people really have one) at the cost of 10s of millions of wasted person hours every year. Just make the defaults fair for everyone and sane for everyone. Also, while at fixing things, please fix zoning and permits and finances and taxation to incentivize the missing 80 years of insufficient house creation.
  - tinco 5y ago
    I bought my house on a contract that was based off the national standard contract for residence transactions. Deviations from the standard were clearly marked. Regardless the contract was read to me by the realtor when I signed for the intent to buy, and the most important points were reiterated by the notary when confirming the actual transaction. It was great I found it useful and comforting to know I was signing for, doubly so knowing it was mostly the standard contract everyone else signs for. That said. Your "10s of millions of wasted person hours" is a twisted way of presenting the data. Reading the contract was 30 minutes. That's 0.00019% of the time I will spend paying my largest monthly expense towards.
denton-scratch 5y ago
> or they're just as good as any other lawyer My experience is that some advocates are much better than most advocates. The best lawyer I've had was a trainee barrister, standing in for a run-of-the-mill high-street solicitor, who couldn't show up. Presumably because she was a trainee, she did a really meticulous job for me, on what was a trivial offence: speeding. Few lawyers would put much effort into a speeding ticket. She got me off; I was speeding, but I had been charged under the wrong section of the Road Traffic Act. "I humbly submit, your honour, that it would be quite wrong, your honour, for my client to be convicted of an offence he didn't commit, your honour".
- chinathrow 5y ago
  Where you charged for speeding afterwards?
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    No, she got me off. I was acquitted. The copper that was standing duty as the prosecutor wasn't briefed. He had an afternoon's-worth of cases to present, and he wasn't qualified to argue a case. And either I couldn't be re-charged because double-jeopardy, or it just wasn't worth the effort. Just as icing on the cake, my advocate was a stunningly beautiful redhead.
    - CamelCaseName 5y ago
      > Just as icing on the cake, my advocate was a stunningly beautiful redhead. relevance?
      - nurbel 5y ago
        Not saying that mentioning it that way is relevant here, but I'd wager that being good looking is an asset for a lawyer in court.
      - denton-scratch 5y ago
        Only that I had a lucky day in more ways than one.
sriku 5y ago
Not sure if this works well enough, but tools like https://legalmind.tech/summarizer/ https://legalmind.tech/summarizer/ could play a valuable role here and cause legalese to simplify along the way too. Edit: another one https://pribot.org/polisis https://pribot.org/polisis
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
What's likely to happen is we develop some sort of UCC-esque base contract that normalizes all the fine print boilerplate so that future contracts can just reference it in a manner to the tune of "these terms of service are like literally every other terms of service you agree to but with the following exceptions/specifications".
- lbriner 5y ago
  I thought the same thing but ultimately, many organisations want loads of exceptions to the standards for whatever reason. My wife is a Solicitor and when I proposed this, she laughed. There are already standard legal forms in the UK for many things but it never works out like that. Even if the general intention is to use standard contracts, each company will have its own concerns: "Our ships are cheaper but a little older, we should reduce the amount of liability accordingly", "We use cheaper off-shore staff so we need to add clauses around languages etc." All of these add up to the mess that we end up with in the Ts and Cs.
antattack 5y ago
Part of a solution could be to require fine print and it's revisions to be posted online so it's easily accessible and up-to-date. Once fine-print is published we could have a review sites (similar to fact checking sites) that could extract the essence from the fine print and point out major points, issues, etc. Another, solution that would dis-incentivize 'kitchen-sink' contracts would be ability to invalidate whole contract if one of the clauses is found invalid.
- lbriner 5y ago
  You are massively over-simplifying the problem. Imagine someone put their contract online somewhere saying, "you must litigate in Miami-Dade County", what happens next? Is that lawful? Is it reasonable? Is it moral? You could easily have multiple legal professionals arguing about whether it is or isn't and at the end of the day, most people decide with their wallet anyway. The reason we have Courts in many cases is to try and make decisions on grey areas in terms of what has already been decided elsewhere, you can't open-source that because even the judges won't agree.
  - antattack 5y ago
    I think it's a step in the right direction. Single location where people can access fine print and it's revisions (fine print reserving the right to change at any time is such a BS) would make fine print more accessible (you can zoom in, print, etc, and service could monitor for changes and alert you to it. Argument that one needs a lawyer to understand the contract highlights a problem with contracts. We all could use education and discussion about contract clauses and analyzing contract clauses online would be a perfect forum for that. It would also put pressure on contract writers and companies to make them more reasonable and clear.
adolph 5y ago
> Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex. Yeah, there outta be a law 'bout it > Then there's the money. Single payer law is an idea whose time has come.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
specialist 5y ago
Yes and: I'm fascinated by 5-4's critiques of law, the legal system (in the USA), law school, courts, and so forth. https://www.fivefourpod.com https://www.fivefourpod.com IANAL. Emphatically. I just can't wrap my head around it all. I'm an outsider looking in, from a distance. But it seems important, like something I should know. So I've been reading books. Mostly stuff from the library. But I still don't feel any smarter about this stuff.
snake_plissken 5y ago
> "even if you did you wouldn't know what it meant in terms of law" I think by far this is the biggest issue with EULAs and fine print: you really have no idea what anything means because it's all been crafted to cover legal concepts for which you have no prior knowledge.
sircastor 5y ago
>Either they're more effective than other lawyers, in which case we're not all equal under the law, or they're just as good as any other lawyer. This is a problem with the nuance of law, not lawyers. The thing that finally clicked for me was talking with a lawyer at a electronics meetup. He was talking about some aspect of the law, and I realized that lawyers are just hackers. The system that they try to exploit is the law, rather than a computer. Your money gets you a better hacker. The system is the same for everyone, but the interface is flexible.
mbostleman 5y ago
It is frustrating. It's easy to villainize the producers and their lawyers. But on the other hand, it would be nice if consumers weren't so lazy and would instead stand up for themselves and fight back. But then that becomes hard if there isn't sufficient competition and choices in the market. At the end of the day, I think that the occurrence of consumers losing on actual lawsuits (much less even being involved in one) is sufficiently rare that it wouldn't justify the increased cost of goods if the risk were more balanced.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
“Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex.” That’s where diversity would help a lot. Congress should be more diverse in terms of background. Laws should be made by people with backgrounds in a variety of professions and not just lawyers and businesspeople as it’s in congress right now. It’s no surprise that they crank out laws that appeal to people with their backgrounds.
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
One of my least favorite trends: offices that give you pages of contract to agree to in order to just have a meeting on premises. I got one of these in a job interview situation and it really was pages upon pages. I was in the lobby waiting for a job interview, and the person sent to fetch me was visibly pissed off I took the time to at least skim what the heck was in this agreement. I mean what a messed up context. Obviously I won't get the interview unless I agree, and there's zero chance of negotiating any of these points. Should I just wave past it to placate the interviewers impatience? If I take my time to go through the details will they read me as a potential problem employee that will be legalistic about ordinary matters? If I don't take my time am I signaling that I'm a lax coworker that doesn't apply due diligence? If the interview goes well should I use the same behavior when evaluating the employment agreement? When signing the initial "get past the lobby" contract did I end up agreeing to something that could have implications for me later working at this location? The whole thing is a kafkaesque farce. I applaud Stevens for his stunt, even if only ultimately a symbolic protest. It feels like reform in this area requires a generation of lawyers that become the top judges that are willing to oppose the mentality of most lawyers.
- yencabulator 5y ago
  This one time I watched my COO say that he isn't signing the Facebook visitor NDA without getting a lawyer's approval on it first, and if they're not cool with that they can try to reschedule our meeting to happen outside the building. It worked, never signed.

noduerme 5y ago

The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking. It's no different than being a victim of dark pattern software practices, which you would be if you didn't know how to code. (Ironically, part of my slot involves helping lawyers get around pitfalls in software).

chaosite 5y ago
Dark patterns in software usually involve UI/UX, so knowing to code doesn't really help with those. On the other hand, being able to code an app might be enough to make someone go "why is it like that? I know it doesn't have to be!" in response to a dark pattern.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Yes. This is what I meant. Experience in code lets you see dark patterns quickly in software. Experience in law lets you see them in _everything_.
cbozeman 5y ago
This is a stupid answer. And I don't mean it's ignorant, I mean it's stupid. The answer to a problem cannot be, "Become a subject matter expert in that field." You don't understand the problem with your small intestine? Become a gastroenterologist. No thanks. Society has to be built on trust to function. Yes, we've allowed for an enormous amount of trust to be eroded in the Western world, but that's over now. We either make the hard choices to rebuild these institutions or we see the long slow miserable collapse of our society.
- panta 5y ago
  I don't think it's a stupid answer. Maybe too extreme, but I believe it contains some elements of truth. Trust has been largely eroded by greed, corruption and incompetence, and if one counts only on trust is probably going to get the short end of the stick. As a matter of fact, when you "outsource" some activity, you need some non-zero amount of competence in the outsourced field to be able to evaluate the level of service and avoid terrible outcomes. This is sadly true even when you go to a gastroenterologist.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    "Too extreme" is putting it mildly. Most people couldn't even afford to go to law school. A great many wouldn't have the spare time to study another specialty and a lot might not even be capable of competently understanding the material even if they did go to law school (we all have our strengths and weaknesses after all. For example I'd be a hopeless doctor, chef or teacher). And that's before you've factored in that you also need to keep on top of any new case studies and changes in legislation else risk your knowledge becoming irreverent. In short, if it were that easy then more people would do it since the kind of jobs it unlocks generally pays pretty well (easily above the national average).
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    I think it's impolite to label the original answer stupid, he seems to have taken time to at least think about it, and we should keep a civil tone here. However, I agree with the guy who called it stupid. Not in calling it stupid, but in that it's an answer that creates more questions than it answers. You could nuance it and take the steelman version, which is that everyone should be generally educated and know a bit about everything, but we all know it's unrealistic. You can't do part of an actuarial degree so that you understand insurance. But you have to buy insurance. You can't flip through a psychology intro so that you can be prepared when you see a therapist. Or read DS&A so that you can hire a programmer. Or read about structures for when you buy a house, or learn to play the piano so you can enjoy music. You just can't do all these things to a degree where you are covered everywhere. Now the problem with certain fields is they reach into everyone's lives to a significant degree. Law is one of those, medicine is another, and finance is yet another. So you can't even narrow it down to "do these things only", because you can't become an expert in multiple broad fields like that. The only realistic answer is to known a tiny bit about a bunch of things, and a lot about one "thing" and then rely on social institutions to make sure you get what you're due when interacting with experts in other fields.
lostlogin 5y ago
Does that mean that everyone on HN should have a computer science degree, a marketing degree and an MBA?
- pjc50 5y ago
  Don't forget the medical degree so you can "do your own research", and the mechanic qualifications so you can avoid being scammed when it comes to fixing your car.
- laichzeit0 5y ago
  At least have a degree in cryptography so you can verify your random number generator is cryptographically secure. A trivial task for the average HN reader, except the greatest impediment being that mathematics is impenetrable largely because of the obscure notation that mathematicians use when writing it.
  - tomrod 5y ago
    This is like complaining that code syntax is inscrutable because someone hasn't taken the time to learn it. While it may be difficult to access without some time spent on it, mathematical symbology avoids massive verbosity.
rovr138 5y ago
My "hack" around this is, have a friend that's a lawyer. I lucked out in that we had been friends before. I have answered many development and programming questions and issues for them, and they have for me too. To others commenting, I guess it's about having trust in others and using that. We have friends and family that are in CS, accounting, law, medicine, etc. What we don't have, we pay for. Find a good resource and pay them. I guess this goes back to the grandparent post were they talk about access and costs of different lawyers.
- noduerme 5y ago
  That's the right hack in a lot of cases. Where would we be without friends who know more than we do about these things? But those friends also educate themselves in a lot of fields - and they know what they are or aren't qualified to answer. So if I ask a friend who's a graphics guy about lighting he can help me, but he'll point me to someone better. Or if I ask family members about a specific legal thing, they'll refer me to someone more specialized in a particular form of law. Nothing wrong with that. It's more like: I need to know enough at least to tell whether I'm being bullshitted or not; I trust my friends to know enough to tell me if they can't fully answer my question. But there is nowhere in that chain where knowing more isn't valuable.
atoav 5y ago
It saddens me that such a great part of US society (as I perceive it from the outside) has basically given up on fixing any systemic problem at all. Be it small things like robocalls, or bigger things like a broken healthcare system, gun violence, lobbying in politics or things like the housing/opiod crisis — a big part of the US people I talk to have basically given up on any collective way of fixing these issues and just try to shield themselves individually from the consequences and risks. The summed up individual time, nerve and energy spent on this must easily outweigh the time, nerve and energy it would cost to fix these issues collectively. Sometimes I even have the feeling that some people like hurdles like these because they believe it gives them some kind of "edge" in the competition with others — a bit like in the 30-year-war where at some point people had adapted to the war so much, they didn't want it to end, because they were a little less worse off than their peers — they had forgotten how much better off they could be if there was peace.
- jeffreygoesto 5y ago
  What makes you think that these are systemic _problems_? Maybe they _are_ the system? SCNR. I am completely with you. There is a good deal of acquired helplessness involved where small deviations from that "system" are always are conceived as degressions, so the system can not be questioned in general. Wait for the "but capitalism is the best we could come up with so far" arguments to arrive. They are not completely wrong and part of the game...
- sdoering 5y ago
  As a total outsider my first instinct was to agree. Then I thought about aspects in my country (Germany) and thought that while not so obvious and blatant we have basically the same problems. And they grow year over year. Let's take the example that the public prosecutor's office is bound by the instructions of the Ministry of Justice. Let us now assume that someone files charges against two politicians on the (justified) suspicion of supporting tax evasion by banks, and let us assume that these politicians now hold very prominent positions in the country. How would the public prosecutor's office react? Exactly. The initial suspicion necessary for an investigation is denied. Despite demonstrable false statements made by the politicians in question before parliamentary investigative committees. There are also regular rulings by the Hamburg court (think Delaware) regarding copyright, addblockers and the like. Here, too, the individual can do nothing. Because the system is not made to allow such influence of individuals. The elected representatives have gone through years of party school. Polished smoothly. Streamlined. Who questions things or acts in the sense of the people will find no place on the list to be elected. Who wants to found an own party must do a lot and will fail in the vast majority of cases because you need 5% of the votes to be represented at all in parliament. Demonstrations, petitions and the like have not changed anything for a long time. Imho we live in a corporate democracy. Not a democracy that represents any "people". So the rational thing to do is to stop caring and to "only" protect one's own personal life and that of one's loved ones.
FpUser 5y ago
>"The answer according to my family: Get a law degree" Form your own country and become a president.
- pc86 5y ago
  As useful a suggestion, but at least this one was funny.
jeroenhd 5y ago
If that's their response, then you should also expect them to get a computer science degree every time MS Word shows a vague popup and every time their OS hides or changes the way it works, or every time a major software update breaks existing functionality. I'm sure it would make the lives of whoever manages their IT a lot easier if they can just expect the lawyers to go through a few more years of college. You can just blindly deploy updates, assume everybody uses the communicated backup plan and put the full blame on the lawyers if they get hacked because they use a crappy password. Sysadmin heaven!
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
> The answer according to my family: Get a law degree. I'm the only one who doesn't have one / hasn't passed a bar exam. If you don't want to be victim of that system, treat being a lawyer as a form of hacking We can't have a functional society like this: by the time i am done getting a law degree, a software degree, a finance degree (massive dark pattern there), medical degree , etc - i will be 60 and millions in debt. In a functional society you rely on the rest of society to get things roughly correct, and to not defraud you every step. Adopt the dog-eats-dog view of the world, and you will get basically russia - spciety ruled by fraud and violence, with mafia boss at the helm
- noduerme 5y ago
  I'd counter that if you expect people to handle all your legal issues, your software issues, your financial issues and your medical issues, without a solid understanding of any of those fields, you're also going to spend (and likely waste) a lot of money h and be less effective than if you knew what was going on. Of those things you mentioned, only the law degree is useful when dealing with issues that arise in all of the others.
  - otterley 5y ago
    The statistics don’t support your assertion. Most people aren’t lawyers, and the median amount of money a person spends on legal counsel is pretty low.
    - noduerme 5y ago
      The question in any given area you outsource to experts isn't how much you spend, but what percentage you waste as a result of lacking domain specific knowledge. For instance, I'm not a good auto mechanic, let alone an expert. But I've read my car's factory service manual end to end, and looked up a lot of what I didn't understand. I don't usually have to ask a mechanic what's wrong, but if a mechanic tells me something I understand what they're talking about and what it should cost, and thus, I might pay $1000 for a job where someone else would pay $3000. Having as much domain specific knowledge as you can is always a good thing. That's the point. Building wealth is not about refraining from spending money. It's about getting what your money is worth without getting scammed.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
This is one of those answers that will get written up about in the New Yorker. Clearly the most logical answer for this audience…
- noduerme 5y ago
  Apparently it wasn't that well taken. Is the New Yorker accepting submissions from roundly rejected HN commenters these days? I've always wanted to caption one of those cartoons. "Yes, my accountant always does his business in the bushes". That sorta thing.

pydry 5y ago

>At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity. This isnt a problem startups can, nor should they solve. It requires political will.

kergonath 5y ago
> This isnt a problem startups can, nor should they solve. It requires political will. Indeed. I really don’t want any tech bro to come and disrupt the legal framework, move fast and break things. It’s probably not the last thing I want, but quite close. I’d rather work under an imperfect legal system than be at the whim of another sociopathic arsehole.

pjc50 5y ago

> At least here in the UK, the court system does not have enough capacity Yeah, that's a political decision; the government is so anti-public service that it's cut it to disastrous levels. In many cases the cuts to legal aid are politically targeted at situations where the government was losing too many cases.

dalbasal 5y ago
Political/funding decisions are part of the mix, but I don't think the daylight between highly funded and underfunded amounts to fundamental difference. Courts are extremely costly and/or low throughput. The vast majority of legal resolutions happen outside of courts, whether or not they even touch a court along the way. It just is not designed for efficiency. Court systems are designed to embody legal ideals (and imo myths) of justice, that may be pretty far from common sense ideals. We basically can't have a decent court system unless appealing to it is extremely rare. This is the nature of the legal system, not a consequence of details like funding.
- Retric 5y ago
  Courts don’t actually need to deal with vary many cases though. I suspect the average person needs to deal with the legal system for anything more complex than a speeding ticket less than once per decade. And as it turns out five minutes in front of a judge can easily handle: “The speed camera is showing a picture of a pickup truck, I drive an SUV.” It’s only a minute fraction of cases that take significant time to resolve. The UK has ~700 homicide victims per year and significantly fewer murder trials. Individual trials can be long and expensive without it actually adding up to a significant expense.
  - aardvark179 5y ago
    So, looking at stats for England and Wales about 80% of homicide incidents result in one or more suspects being charged and a small number of those end up being acquitted (though it often takes some time for people to be charged). I guess that counts as significantly fewer, but wasn’t the impression I got from my initial reading of your post.

makeitdouble 5y ago

> It's a complete fiction that normal people read pages and pages of contracts, EULAs, and that type of stuff. I think incredibly long EULAs would be fine if violation on technicalities were lighter, and/or critical sections were put on top, in plain language. For instance, I wouldn't care much about Youtube's terms and services outside of what would warrant an account ban, and what's the privacy boundaries. If Google had a clause to change my name to a random "white_dove_mud_pond-24523424" like string every time I include excrement related words in a comment, I probably wouldn't care much, they can hide it where they want. If instead it was a banning offense, I'd want it in the first 10 lines in big red bold letters. Failure to make it prominent should be ground for voiding critical clauses. On the other extreme, I assume people actually sit for 20 min and read 30+ pages of contract verbiage when they're buying a house. IMHO there needs to be a proportionality between the time to spend on checking it and the consequences for not doing so.

mjevans 5y ago
Respectfully; No. A standard library of terms, preferably from the highest (and thus widest covering) level of government, should be the bulk and basis of all widely common contracts. I shouldn't have to re-read 40+ pages when I renew my dwelling's rental lease for another year; this should not be one more thing that has to be shopped around for. Don't provide an illusion of choice (as if we the people really have one) at the cost of 10s of millions of wasted person hours every year. Just make the defaults fair for everyone and sane for everyone. Also, while at fixing things, please fix zoning and permits and finances and taxation to incentivize the missing 80 years of insufficient house creation.
- tinco 5y ago
  I bought my house on a contract that was based off the national standard contract for residence transactions. Deviations from the standard were clearly marked. Regardless the contract was read to me by the realtor when I signed for the intent to buy, and the most important points were reiterated by the notary when confirming the actual transaction. It was great I found it useful and comforting to know I was signing for, doubly so knowing it was mostly the standard contract everyone else signs for. That said. Your "10s of millions of wasted person hours" is a twisted way of presenting the data. Reading the contract was 30 minutes. That's 0.00019% of the time I will spend paying my largest monthly expense towards.

denton-scratch 5y ago

> or they're just as good as any other lawyer My experience is that some advocates are much better than most advocates. The best lawyer I've had was a trainee barrister, standing in for a run-of-the-mill high-street solicitor, who couldn't show up. Presumably because she was a trainee, she did a really meticulous job for me, on what was a trivial offence: speeding. Few lawyers would put much effort into a speeding ticket. She got me off; I was speeding, but I had been charged under the wrong section of the Road Traffic Act. "I humbly submit, your honour, that it would be quite wrong, your honour, for my client to be convicted of an offence he didn't commit, your honour".

chinathrow 5y ago
Where you charged for speeding afterwards?
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  No, she got me off. I was acquitted. The copper that was standing duty as the prosecutor wasn't briefed. He had an afternoon's-worth of cases to present, and he wasn't qualified to argue a case. And either I couldn't be re-charged because double-jeopardy, or it just wasn't worth the effort. Just as icing on the cake, my advocate was a stunningly beautiful redhead.
  - CamelCaseName 5y ago
    > Just as icing on the cake, my advocate was a stunningly beautiful redhead. relevance?
    - nurbel 5y ago
      Not saying that mentioning it that way is relevant here, but I'd wager that being good looking is an asset for a lawyer in court.
    - denton-scratch 5y ago
      Only that I had a lucky day in more ways than one.

sriku 5y ago

Not sure if this works well enough, but tools like https://legalmind.tech/summarizer/ https://legalmind.tech/summarizer/ could play a valuable role here and cause legalese to simplify along the way too. Edit: another one https://pribot.org/polisis https://pribot.org/polisis

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

What's likely to happen is we develop some sort of UCC-esque base contract that normalizes all the fine print boilerplate so that future contracts can just reference it in a manner to the tune of "these terms of service are like literally every other terms of service you agree to but with the following exceptions/specifications".

lbriner 5y ago
I thought the same thing but ultimately, many organisations want loads of exceptions to the standards for whatever reason. My wife is a Solicitor and when I proposed this, she laughed. There are already standard legal forms in the UK for many things but it never works out like that. Even if the general intention is to use standard contracts, each company will have its own concerns: "Our ships are cheaper but a little older, we should reduce the amount of liability accordingly", "We use cheaper off-shore staff so we need to add clauses around languages etc." All of these add up to the mess that we end up with in the Ts and Cs.

antattack 5y ago

Part of a solution could be to require fine print and it's revisions to be posted online so it's easily accessible and up-to-date. Once fine-print is published we could have a review sites (similar to fact checking sites) that could extract the essence from the fine print and point out major points, issues, etc. Another, solution that would dis-incentivize 'kitchen-sink' contracts would be ability to invalidate whole contract if one of the clauses is found invalid.

lbriner 5y ago
You are massively over-simplifying the problem. Imagine someone put their contract online somewhere saying, "you must litigate in Miami-Dade County", what happens next? Is that lawful? Is it reasonable? Is it moral? You could easily have multiple legal professionals arguing about whether it is or isn't and at the end of the day, most people decide with their wallet anyway. The reason we have Courts in many cases is to try and make decisions on grey areas in terms of what has already been decided elsewhere, you can't open-source that because even the judges won't agree.
- antattack 5y ago
  I think it's a step in the right direction. Single location where people can access fine print and it's revisions (fine print reserving the right to change at any time is such a BS) would make fine print more accessible (you can zoom in, print, etc, and service could monitor for changes and alert you to it. Argument that one needs a lawyer to understand the contract highlights a problem with contracts. We all could use education and discussion about contract clauses and analyzing contract clauses online would be a perfect forum for that. It would also put pressure on contract writers and companies to make them more reasonable and clear.

adolph 5y ago

> Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex. Yeah, there outta be a law 'bout it > Then there's the money. Single payer law is an idea whose time has come.

deleted 5y ago

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specialist 5y ago

Yes and: I'm fascinated by 5-4's critiques of law, the legal system (in the USA), law school, courts, and so forth. https://www.fivefourpod.com https://www.fivefourpod.com IANAL. Emphatically. I just can't wrap my head around it all. I'm an outsider looking in, from a distance. But it seems important, like something I should know. So I've been reading books. Mostly stuff from the library. But I still don't feel any smarter about this stuff.

snake_plissken 5y ago

> "even if you did you wouldn't know what it meant in terms of law" I think by far this is the biggest issue with EULAs and fine print: you really have no idea what anything means because it's all been crafted to cover legal concepts for which you have no prior knowledge.

sircastor 5y ago

>Either they're more effective than other lawyers, in which case we're not all equal under the law, or they're just as good as any other lawyer. This is a problem with the nuance of law, not lawyers. The thing that finally clicked for me was talking with a lawyer at a electronics meetup. He was talking about some aspect of the law, and I realized that lawyers are just hackers. The system that they try to exploit is the law, rather than a computer. Your money gets you a better hacker. The system is the same for everyone, but the interface is flexible.

mbostleman 5y ago

It is frustrating. It's easy to villainize the producers and their lawyers. But on the other hand, it would be nice if consumers weren't so lazy and would instead stand up for themselves and fight back. But then that becomes hard if there isn't sufficient competition and choices in the market. At the end of the day, I think that the occurrence of consumers losing on actual lawsuits (much less even being involved in one) is sufficiently rare that it wouldn't justify the increased cost of goods if the risk were more balanced.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

“Someone needs to do something about the legal-industrial complex.” That’s where diversity would help a lot. Congress should be more diverse in terms of background. Laws should be made by people with backgrounds in a variety of professions and not just lawyers and businesspeople as it’s in congress right now. It’s no surprise that they crank out laws that appeal to people with their backgrounds.

jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago

One of my least favorite trends: offices that give you pages of contract to agree to in order to just have a meeting on premises. I got one of these in a job interview situation and it really was pages upon pages. I was in the lobby waiting for a job interview, and the person sent to fetch me was visibly pissed off I took the time to at least skim what the heck was in this agreement. I mean what a messed up context. Obviously I won't get the interview unless I agree, and there's zero chance of negotiating any of these points. Should I just wave past it to placate the interviewers impatience? If I take my time to go through the details will they read me as a potential problem employee that will be legalistic about ordinary matters? If I don't take my time am I signaling that I'm a lax coworker that doesn't apply due diligence? If the interview goes well should I use the same behavior when evaluating the employment agreement? When signing the initial "get past the lobby" contract did I end up agreeing to something that could have implications for me later working at this location? The whole thing is a kafkaesque farce. I applaud Stevens for his stunt, even if only ultimately a symbolic protest. It feels like reform in this area requires a generation of lawyers that become the top judges that are willing to oppose the mentality of most lawyers.

yencabulator 5y ago
This one time I watched my COO say that he isn't signing the Facebook visitor NDA without getting a lawyer's approval on it first, and if they're not cool with that they can try to reschedule our meeting to happen outside the building. It worked, never signed.