6 ms·

Peter Thiel on The Future of Legal Technology

53 points by igurari 14y ago

rayiner 14y ago
I think Thiel misses a key point: getting the right answer isn't necessarily as important as the appearance of justice. Human beings are fundamentally emotional creatures, especially in situations when they feel they have been wronged or are accused of wronging someone else. The whole process of a trial with a human judge and a human jury doesn't just resolve a dispute, but it serves as an emotional palliative allowing people to get beyond the dispute. And that is, of course, one of the key functions of the legal system as a system of dispute resolution: allowing society to continue to function by helping people get over disputes.
- igurari 14y ago
  I think this is a very good point, and I totally agree about the importance of emotion and the appearance of justice in our legal system. But I'm not sure it follows that the appearance of justice is at odds with getting things right. A better system would get things right and feel like a fair system to the participants. My personal opinion is that you can get both with a more transparent system. In theory, a transparent system would drive consistency, and consistent outcomes would hopefully converge around correct outcomes.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    I think the danger is when it comes to automation/rigid rules. People want to feel like their problems are unique and being considered in all their unique complexity. That makes achieving transparency or automation hard, because a system of hard and fast rules is more amenable to transparency than a system of fuzzy fact-specific inquiries.
    - ramanujan 14y ago
      But at what cost? There is a tremendous opportunity for pretty-good, bargain-basement, automated legal services.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        Is there? There are two kinds of clients in the legal field: rich ones and poor ones. Rich clients don't seek the cheapest legal services in the way they don't look for the cheapest office space or the cheapest office furniture. No board member wants some guy in India poring through his e-mails to do an investigation or diligence for a transaction. For rich clients, saving money and hiring "pretty good" isn't such a great thing if their opposing party spends more money and hires "pretty great." Poor clients are different. Poor clients do want the lowest possible price for the given result. But poor clients tend to have problems that are hard to outsource. How is an attorney sitting in India supposed to represent you in your divorce, or help you get out of a traffic ticket?
    - igurari 14y ago
      Correct - and that is why I think that automation will not get us all the way there. (At least not in the 20-50 year range; I have no idea what the world will look like in 1000 years.) And I think your point suggests that lawyers will continue to be valuable for many years to come, as well. There are so many rules that can be applied in a given case - including seemingly contradictory ones - that there is room for reasonable disagreement about which rule should be applied. A skillful lawyer can make a compelling (but not obvious) argument that rule A should be applied and not rule B.
- PeterisP 14y ago
  Thiel spends half of the article banging at that exact point - the current system is stuck at appeasing emotions and appearances resulting in a grossly unjust system, resulting in evil deeds done in the name of 'justice'. This should be fixed.
ramanujan 14y ago
The legal industry is perfectly suited to be utterly destroyed by startups. It's pure information work, it can be done from offshore, it is generally disliked by the public, and as a whole is pretty much entirely technologically inept. Certification regimes present a barrier to full automation, but with so many young and unemployed lawyers, you could easily get around that as well. Just do most of the stuff on the computer and let Mr. cheap-young-JD sign off on the last mile work on his phone. Each contract he goes through knocks another $100 off his student loan bill. Use the law schools' oversupply to break the legal industry and bring cheap legal services to all. The main threat will be regulation. Putting lawyers out of work will mean they will try to rewrite the law to ban you. Depending on how you structure it, you might want to ally with a few firms in each vertical to rain fire upon their competitors. As long as you divide and conquer, and some lawyers are profiting from the new regime, it will make it much more difficult for the ABA to achieve consensus on the imminent threat your startup undoubtedly poses to the health of the republic. EDIT: Even more interesting...as a dotcom you may also be able to market your services in a way that normal lawyers cannot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_advertising#In_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_advertising#In_the_United...
- rayiner 14y ago
  So I'm a lawyer and you should take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think you've misread the market. There has been an oversupply of legal gradutes for decades now. Today, half of law graduates don't get a job, and 90% can't get a job at a big firm. Yet, big firms are still paying $160k+bonus to people fresh out of school, because that's what they have to pay to get kids out of the top 15-20 schools or the tippy-top kids from the lower-ranked schools. Why do they continue to do this when lowering their standards for pedigree could cut their costs massively? You can say that it's because law firms are stupid and invested in the status quo, but corporate clients surely aren't. Why do firms persist in putting so much stock in hiring Harvard/Yale/etc graduates, and why do clients keep hiring such firms? If there was really an opening in the market you could drive a truck through, what has stopped anyone from taking advantage of it thus far?
  - bgmasters 14y ago
dreamdu5t 14y ago
This is surprisingly naive for someone like Peter Thiel. The law is not an axiomatic rule based system, and it's far too complex and fuzzy to be automated. We haven't even automated medical records for godsakes!
- jbooth 14y ago
  This is surprisingly naive for someone who wants to build a floating city in order to create libertarian paradise? What would be 'expectedly naive'?
  - dreamdu5t 14y ago
    touché
  - crusso 14y ago
    This is surprisingly naive for someone who wants to build a floating city in order to create libertarian paradise? Was it surprisingly naive for the explorers and founders of the New World to want to build new societies based upon their ideas? They packed up everything they owned and risked their very lives to go to somewhere lacking an entrenched society so they could build something new. The effects of their experiment have been disproportionately dominant in the culture and growth of the world for centuries. Now we're in a world where all the land is spoken for by government bodies that enforce their monopolies on governance through force. Imagine if government said, "There can be no new startup companies. You'll have to influence the existing companies from within." How would entrepreneurs feel about being unable to start new enterprises?
    - jbooth 14y ago
      A continent generally provides more opportunities to be self-sufficient than a retro-fitted cruise ship. EDIT: Also, survival rate on those colonization trips? Not so great. And that was with things like DIRT around that you can PLANT things in. Basically, the 'floating city' idea is just a rebranding of what current cruise ships already offer: Pay exorbitant prices for everything in order to be on the ocean. Ain't no new society coming out of that.
sek 14y ago
Well why not start somewhere, create axiomatic TOS for example and proceed with contracts between companies. There has to be academic groundwork to build something like that, a mixture of CS and law. Maybe some students at a law faculty could create a project together with a few CS students just to get the stone rolling. A programming language to describe who is responsible for cleaning the flat.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

53 points by igurari 14y ago

I think Thiel misses a key point: getting the right answer isn't necessarily as important as the appearance of justice. Human beings are fundamentally emotional creatures, especially in situations when they feel they have been wronged or are accused of wronging someone else. The whole process of a trial with a human judge and a human jury doesn't just resolve a dispute, but it serves as an emotional palliative allowing people to get beyond the dispute. And that is, of course, one of the key functions of the legal system as a system of dispute resolution: allowing society to continue to function by helping people get over disputes.

igurari 14y ago
I think this is a very good point, and I totally agree about the importance of emotion and the appearance of justice in our legal system. But I'm not sure it follows that the appearance of justice is at odds with getting things right. A better system would get things right and feel like a fair system to the participants. My personal opinion is that you can get both with a more transparent system. In theory, a transparent system would drive consistency, and consistent outcomes would hopefully converge around correct outcomes.
- rayiner 14y ago
  I think the danger is when it comes to automation/rigid rules. People want to feel like their problems are unique and being considered in all their unique complexity. That makes achieving transparency or automation hard, because a system of hard and fast rules is more amenable to transparency than a system of fuzzy fact-specific inquiries.
  - ramanujan 14y ago
    But at what cost? There is a tremendous opportunity for pretty-good, bargain-basement, automated legal services.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      Is there? There are two kinds of clients in the legal field: rich ones and poor ones. Rich clients don't seek the cheapest legal services in the way they don't look for the cheapest office space or the cheapest office furniture. No board member wants some guy in India poring through his e-mails to do an investigation or diligence for a transaction. For rich clients, saving money and hiring "pretty good" isn't such a great thing if their opposing party spends more money and hires "pretty great." Poor clients are different. Poor clients do want the lowest possible price for the given result. But poor clients tend to have problems that are hard to outsource. How is an attorney sitting in India supposed to represent you in your divorce, or help you get out of a traffic ticket?
  - igurari 14y ago
    Correct - and that is why I think that automation will not get us all the way there. (At least not in the 20-50 year range; I have no idea what the world will look like in 1000 years.) And I think your point suggests that lawyers will continue to be valuable for many years to come, as well. There are so many rules that can be applied in a given case - including seemingly contradictory ones - that there is room for reasonable disagreement about which rule should be applied. A skillful lawyer can make a compelling (but not obvious) argument that rule A should be applied and not rule B.
PeterisP 14y ago
Thiel spends half of the article banging at that exact point - the current system is stuck at appeasing emotions and appearances resulting in a grossly unjust system, resulting in evil deeds done in the name of 'justice'. This should be fixed.

ramanujan 14y ago

The legal industry is perfectly suited to be utterly destroyed by startups. It's pure information work, it can be done from offshore, it is generally disliked by the public, and as a whole is pretty much entirely technologically inept. Certification regimes present a barrier to full automation, but with so many young and unemployed lawyers, you could easily get around that as well. Just do most of the stuff on the computer and let Mr. cheap-young-JD sign off on the last mile work on his phone. Each contract he goes through knocks another $100 off his student loan bill. Use the law schools' oversupply to break the legal industry and bring cheap legal services to all. The main threat will be regulation. Putting lawyers out of work will mean they will try to rewrite the law to ban you. Depending on how you structure it, you might want to ally with a few firms in each vertical to rain fire upon their competitors. As long as you divide and conquer, and some lawyers are profiting from the new regime, it will make it much more difficult for the ABA to achieve consensus on the imminent threat your startup undoubtedly poses to the health of the republic. EDIT: Even more interesting...as a dotcom you may also be able to market your services in a way that normal lawyers cannot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_advertising#In_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_advertising#In_the_United...

rayiner 14y ago
So I'm a lawyer and you should take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think you've misread the market. There has been an oversupply of legal gradutes for decades now. Today, half of law graduates don't get a job, and 90% can't get a job at a big firm. Yet, big firms are still paying $160k+bonus to people fresh out of school, because that's what they have to pay to get kids out of the top 15-20 schools or the tippy-top kids from the lower-ranked schools. Why do they continue to do this when lowering their standards for pedigree could cut their costs massively? You can say that it's because law firms are stupid and invested in the status quo, but corporate clients surely aren't. Why do firms persist in putting so much stock in hiring Harvard/Yale/etc graduates, and why do clients keep hiring such firms? If there was really an opening in the market you could drive a truck through, what has stopped anyone from taking advantage of it thus far?
- bgmasters 14y ago

dreamdu5t 14y ago

This is surprisingly naive for someone like Peter Thiel. The law is not an axiomatic rule based system, and it's far too complex and fuzzy to be automated. We haven't even automated medical records for godsakes!

jbooth 14y ago
This is surprisingly naive for someone who wants to build a floating city in order to create libertarian paradise? What would be 'expectedly naive'?
- dreamdu5t 14y ago
  touché
- crusso 14y ago
  This is surprisingly naive for someone who wants to build a floating city in order to create libertarian paradise? Was it surprisingly naive for the explorers and founders of the New World to want to build new societies based upon their ideas? They packed up everything they owned and risked their very lives to go to somewhere lacking an entrenched society so they could build something new. The effects of their experiment have been disproportionately dominant in the culture and growth of the world for centuries. Now we're in a world where all the land is spoken for by government bodies that enforce their monopolies on governance through force. Imagine if government said, "There can be no new startup companies. You'll have to influence the existing companies from within." How would entrepreneurs feel about being unable to start new enterprises?
  - jbooth 14y ago
    A continent generally provides more opportunities to be self-sufficient than a retro-fitted cruise ship. EDIT: Also, survival rate on those colonization trips? Not so great. And that was with things like DIRT around that you can PLANT things in. Basically, the 'floating city' idea is just a rebranding of what current cruise ships already offer: Pay exorbitant prices for everything in order to be on the ocean. Ain't no new society coming out of that.

sek 14y ago

Well why not start somewhere, create axiomatic TOS for example and proceed with contracts between companies. There has to be academic groundwork to build something like that, a mixture of CS and law. Maybe some students at a law faculty could create a project together with a few CS students just to get the stone rolling. A programming language to describe who is responsible for cleaning the flat.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]