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Why do they continue to do this when lowering their standards for pedigree could cut their costs massively? If there was really an opening in the market y

Why do they continue to do this when lowering their standards for pedigree could cut their costs massively? 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? The key reason is that in this scenario, all the intelligence is being implemented in the computer, with a few Stanford JDs at the company making sure the code is up to snuff at a high level. Then your less-skilled JDs can review the documents mass produced by software, in a sort of legal assembly line. They may not be able to follow chains of complex reasoning, but that's ok: engineers + Stanford JDs already made sure the legal templates and algorithms worked on representative data. In other words, we are making use here of the old joke - "What do you call the guy who got the lowest GPA in medical school? Doctor." Similarly, the less-skilled JDs who can't get jobs today do have one very important asset: they passed the boolean threshold and are licensed to practice law. Hollow out everything else, replace it by software, and use this army as scalable last-mile reviewers with the thinking done by code. Their value-add is that they absorb the last mile liability, as they are doing final review before release to client. This is no different than the way that Intuit replaces the CPA in many situations. Kind of a TaskRabbit for law. By giving jobs to (a) young tech-savvy jobless students and (b) a few top attorneys from the very best law firms to write the contracts, you can do a pincer attack and massively reduce legal costs.

rayiner 14y ago
For the kind of simple contracts that could be handled by software, people already use form contracts. And remember, you don't need a lawyer at all to draft contracts. As for more complicated contracts, wake me up when software can negotiate risk allocations for you.
- ramanujan 14y ago
  For the kind of simple contracts that could be handled by software, people already use form contracts. And remember, you don't need a lawyer at all to draft contracts. I actually think this market is far bigger than one might think. Legalzoom is doing a $500M IPO and I only heard of them recently. Rocketlawyer is similar. A high quality, heavily marketed site that had forms for the top 100 or so legal issues (with endorsements from top lawyers stating that they reviewed the contracts) would IMO be quite disruptive. Prenups, startup incorporation, wills, employment agreements, things like that.
- btilly 14y ago
  Lawyers are not nearly as necessary for negotiating contracts as they want people to believe. Lawyers, by reflex, attempt to insert themselves in the middle of processes, and naturally tend to create conflict. (This is according to my experience, and the experience of many others.) If a lawyer can do this, the negotiation will naturally take longer, generating billable hours. Secondly lawyers all know that the person who is in a hurry to get a contract is going to get a worse deal, and so will NEVER be in a hurry to close the deal. But there are times when "winning" this negotiation is simply not worth the delay. Now step back and look at it from the point of view of a company. Paying lawyers fees is not good. Creating conflict with someone you want to cooperate with is not good. Making negotiations take longer is not good. Making this concrete, I was in a recent negotiation for a pay for performance compensation. Because it was pay for performance I could quantify how much delays cost the company versus what I will get paid. Their lawyers' delays cost them several times what I will get paid. On my side I did not let my lawyers negotiate. I told them to identify everything in the drafts that I should object to. Then I negotiated without them. Once there was nothing that made me unhappy, I signed. And what I got was pretty much the deal that we agreed to up front, in person, which I emailed to them months earlier. Limiting my lawyers' role saved me thousands of dollars. If the company had limited theirs, they would have saved thousands of dollars. And would have had a contract faster. TD;LR, just because your lawyers want to be involved, and try to convince you that they should be, doesn't mean that they are providing value.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    On the flip side of the coin, lawyers can also mediate between the big egos on the business side that can cause a deal to fall apart over relatively small issues (this happens very often--executives are a lot more personally invested in the process than their lawyers are). Ultimately, the fact is that you don't need a lawyer to negotiate a contract. Yet people use them almost universally in contract negotiations. Is it for irrational reasons? I like to think not, but who knows.
    - btilly 14y ago
      There are very rational reasons to use lawyers. If the other side is using lawyers, you can be sure that they have tried to slip in terrible terms that you really don't want. They won't look that bad, but they will be bad. Relying on yourself to find them is just stupid. And once you're using a lawyer, that lawyer will naturally be inclined to try to turn the negotiation into a gravy train. Try this. The next time you are part of a negotiation and want to redraft the agreement, ask yourself who you are doing it for. Are you serving your client's best interests? Or your interests? Here is another exercise. The next time you see the need to mediate between "big egos on the business side", think carefully about how those egos got unhappy in the first place. I'll give you even odds that the issue they got upset over is one that was introduced by a lawyer. Could the conflict have been avoided entirely if it was negotiated differently? My guess is that, more often than most lawyers would want to admit, the answer is yes.
smalter 14y ago
I think the company that you're describing is LegalZoom.

rayiner 14y ago

For the kind of simple contracts that could be handled by software, people already use form contracts. And remember, you don't need a lawyer at all to draft contracts. As for more complicated contracts, wake me up when software can negotiate risk allocations for you.

ramanujan 14y ago
For the kind of simple contracts that could be handled by software, people already use form contracts. And remember, you don't need a lawyer at all to draft contracts. I actually think this market is far bigger than one might think. Legalzoom is doing a $500M IPO and I only heard of them recently. Rocketlawyer is similar. A high quality, heavily marketed site that had forms for the top 100 or so legal issues (with endorsements from top lawyers stating that they reviewed the contracts) would IMO be quite disruptive. Prenups, startup incorporation, wills, employment agreements, things like that.
btilly 14y ago
Lawyers are not nearly as necessary for negotiating contracts as they want people to believe. Lawyers, by reflex, attempt to insert themselves in the middle of processes, and naturally tend to create conflict. (This is according to my experience, and the experience of many others.) If a lawyer can do this, the negotiation will naturally take longer, generating billable hours. Secondly lawyers all know that the person who is in a hurry to get a contract is going to get a worse deal, and so will NEVER be in a hurry to close the deal. But there are times when "winning" this negotiation is simply not worth the delay. Now step back and look at it from the point of view of a company. Paying lawyers fees is not good. Creating conflict with someone you want to cooperate with is not good. Making negotiations take longer is not good. Making this concrete, I was in a recent negotiation for a pay for performance compensation. Because it was pay for performance I could quantify how much delays cost the company versus what I will get paid. Their lawyers' delays cost them several times what I will get paid. On my side I did not let my lawyers negotiate. I told them to identify everything in the drafts that I should object to. Then I negotiated without them. Once there was nothing that made me unhappy, I signed. And what I got was pretty much the deal that we agreed to up front, in person, which I emailed to them months earlier. Limiting my lawyers' role saved me thousands of dollars. If the company had limited theirs, they would have saved thousands of dollars. And would have had a contract faster. TD;LR, just because your lawyers want to be involved, and try to convince you that they should be, doesn't mean that they are providing value.
- rayiner 14y ago
  On the flip side of the coin, lawyers can also mediate between the big egos on the business side that can cause a deal to fall apart over relatively small issues (this happens very often--executives are a lot more personally invested in the process than their lawyers are). Ultimately, the fact is that you don't need a lawyer to negotiate a contract. Yet people use them almost universally in contract negotiations. Is it for irrational reasons? I like to think not, but who knows.
  - btilly 14y ago
    There are very rational reasons to use lawyers. If the other side is using lawyers, you can be sure that they have tried to slip in terrible terms that you really don't want. They won't look that bad, but they will be bad. Relying on yourself to find them is just stupid. And once you're using a lawyer, that lawyer will naturally be inclined to try to turn the negotiation into a gravy train. Try this. The next time you are part of a negotiation and want to redraft the agreement, ask yourself who you are doing it for. Are you serving your client's best interests? Or your interests? Here is another exercise. The next time you see the need to mediate between "big egos on the business side", think carefully about how those egos got unhappy in the first place. I'll give you even odds that the issue they got upset over is one that was introduced by a lawyer. Could the conflict have been avoided entirely if it was negotiated differently? My guess is that, more often than most lawyers would want to admit, the answer is yes.

smalter 14y ago

I think the company that you're describing is LegalZoom.