7 ms·

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 b

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
  All of this can be called "legal services." But the extremes, you two are essentially talking about different markets. Corporate clients will continue to hire the best lawyers and pay high fees when and because the company is on the line. Most individuals, on the other hand, do not need a Yale Law grad billing $900 an hour to set up a living trust or LLC. Obviously there's a whole spectrum in between. Just flagging that "Tech will utterly destroy the legal industry" and "We'll always have top lawyers starting at $160K" may be talking past each other a bit.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    I don't disagree re: two markets, but even leaving aside big corporate clients there are barriers to outsourcing work. Individuals tend to have one-off problems. They need someone to represent them in a divorce, they need someone to do a will, etc. It's not clear how some "law center worker" sitting in India is supposed to do those things. If there was a market for it, you think someone would have already set something like this up in Nebraska. You can't quite pay $2 an hour for Nebraskans, but you could probably pay $10-15 and get U.S. licensed attorneys in a cheap cost of living state. Heck, document review work in major metro areas these days only pays about $20-$25/hour and those jobs get tons of applicants.
- jbooth 14y ago
  From what I've overheard from lawyer friends, it seems educational pedigree is way culturally overrated in the legal industry. Apparently, if you have ten years experience in a specialized role, where you went to undergrad still matters. That's just crazy. So in light of that, it's possible that everyone's just putting so much stock in those graduates for no good reason at all. Or maybe it's for the same reason as McKinsey and the other management consulting firms. They're billing these fresh grads out at 5-10X what they're paid, and those clients want to feel like they're paying for the best and brightest. As for whether there's an opening you could drive a truck through.. it depends on how much of the work is 'routine' vs how much actually requires a seasoned lawyer to get done.
- 6ren 14y ago
  Yes. Also, there's a spectrum of legal work, from bread-and-butter conveyancing and wills, to appellate litigation. The work that is truly straightforward can be automated... and is. For example, in Australia at least, you can get a DIY wills pack. The essential need for humans in legal work is integration: relating a fact situation with relevant laws. The fact situation is not pre-recorded according to a grammar - and the semantics of the law are not precisely defined. Both aspects and their connection are far more flexible and ambiguous and uncertain than any IT integration. Possibly similar complexity though. tl;dr we'll have automated IT integration long before we have automated legal work.
noonespecial 14y ago
I'm not sure this can work. Law above a certain low level has more in common with politics than computer code. A good case is a political campaign (just with very few voters), not a program. Law 'feels' like code, its kind of the "legal fiction" we need to believe in to stay sane, but when it actually comes down to it, its anything but.
- bgmasters 14y ago
  What you just identified is precisely what Peter is criticizing here. The whole point is that maybe technology can make this fiction less fictitious. You may think that the law is necessarily more like politics, and that there's little room for code. But I don't see any reason for that in your comment, which is more just a reaffirmation that the status quo exists.
  - noonespecial 14y ago
    Good points. I probably didn't word that very well. What I'm getting at is that justice is mostly political not because we couldn't make it more rational, but because we really prefer it that way. Certainly technology can make this fiction less fictitious in the future, but I'm not sure we'll want to use it that way.

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
All of this can be called "legal services." But the extremes, you two are essentially talking about different markets. Corporate clients will continue to hire the best lawyers and pay high fees when and because the company is on the line. Most individuals, on the other hand, do not need a Yale Law grad billing $900 an hour to set up a living trust or LLC. Obviously there's a whole spectrum in between. Just flagging that "Tech will utterly destroy the legal industry" and "We'll always have top lawyers starting at $160K" may be talking past each other a bit.
- rayiner 14y ago
  I don't disagree re: two markets, but even leaving aside big corporate clients there are barriers to outsourcing work. Individuals tend to have one-off problems. They need someone to represent them in a divorce, they need someone to do a will, etc. It's not clear how some "law center worker" sitting in India is supposed to do those things. If there was a market for it, you think someone would have already set something like this up in Nebraska. You can't quite pay $2 an hour for Nebraskans, but you could probably pay $10-15 and get U.S. licensed attorneys in a cheap cost of living state. Heck, document review work in major metro areas these days only pays about $20-$25/hour and those jobs get tons of applicants.
jbooth 14y ago
From what I've overheard from lawyer friends, it seems educational pedigree is way culturally overrated in the legal industry. Apparently, if you have ten years experience in a specialized role, where you went to undergrad still matters. That's just crazy. So in light of that, it's possible that everyone's just putting so much stock in those graduates for no good reason at all. Or maybe it's for the same reason as McKinsey and the other management consulting firms. They're billing these fresh grads out at 5-10X what they're paid, and those clients want to feel like they're paying for the best and brightest. As for whether there's an opening you could drive a truck through.. it depends on how much of the work is 'routine' vs how much actually requires a seasoned lawyer to get done.
6ren 14y ago
Yes. Also, there's a spectrum of legal work, from bread-and-butter conveyancing and wills, to appellate litigation. The work that is truly straightforward can be automated... and is. For example, in Australia at least, you can get a DIY wills pack. The essential need for humans in legal work is integration: relating a fact situation with relevant laws. The fact situation is not pre-recorded according to a grammar - and the semantics of the law are not precisely defined. Both aspects and their connection are far more flexible and ambiguous and uncertain than any IT integration. Possibly similar complexity though. tl;dr we'll have automated IT integration long before we have automated legal work.

noonespecial 14y ago

I'm not sure this can work. Law above a certain low level has more in common with politics than computer code. A good case is a political campaign (just with very few voters), not a program. Law 'feels' like code, its kind of the "legal fiction" we need to believe in to stay sane, but when it actually comes down to it, its anything but.

bgmasters 14y ago
What you just identified is precisely what Peter is criticizing here. The whole point is that maybe technology can make this fiction less fictitious. You may think that the law is necessarily more like politics, and that there's little room for code. But I don't see any reason for that in your comment, which is more just a reaffirmation that the status quo exists.
- noonespecial 14y ago
  Good points. I probably didn't word that very well. What I'm getting at is that justice is mostly political not because we couldn't make it more rational, but because we really prefer it that way. Certainly technology can make this fiction less fictitious in the future, but I'm not sure we'll want to use it that way.