5 ms·

New Series Seed legal forms now in Markdown on Github

70 points by cfield 14y ago

twakefield 14y ago
Awesome. I was just commenting to our lawyers the other day how badly the legal industry needs better version control for documents. The existing paradigm is to pay associates $300/hr to pass redlined word documents back and forth or markup docs by hand during phone calls / meetings and then give the hand marked up docs to legal assistants to input changes. Inevitably things get lost in translation and it's difficult to figure out why things changed versions ago. It's also very expensive. The resistance to change is driven by the fact that the majority of lawyers make a lot of money being inefficient. I'm guessing github is not the preferred interface for lawyers but it could very well be the engine behind a more "lawyer friendly" interface. Great to see the seeds of change being sewn, anyways.
- jwb119 14y ago
  Thanks Taylor! Completely agree with you on your points about lawyer workflow. I'm working on a few things at Fenwick (Series Seed on GitHub is just one) that will hopefully get some of these roadblocks out of the way in the future.
- matthewmcg 14y ago
  Couldn't agree more. As a working transactional attorney and hobbyist coder, I will say that the obstacle to better workflows is not (in most cases) deliberate inefficiency. Rather, the compensation and billing scheme at nearly all firms strongly discourages investment of time in anything that can't be billed to a specific client. Look for that to change as more firms move to fixed fee work.
- DannyBee 14y ago
  In a lot of law firms, the resistance to change is simply because completely changing workflows is not easy to accomplish. They have a lot to do, and given their system works for them, you need to demonstrate the advantages for them. Show them why this will make their lives easier. They wouldn't really make less money, since if they are really spending this much time, it's probably time they could spend billing two clients instead of one (usually better to run up two small bills instead of one large one). In any case, this is true in trying to change any enterprise, law is no different. I converted a group of lawyers, who were still using Corel Wordperfect for drafting multistate legislation, to using an XML based workflow, after showing them why it would make them faster, not why it was "better for the world who was trying to look at drafts". Imagine you used emacs all day, every day, and then someone came in and says "we're all moving to VIM". Personally, I do all my drafting in text and use version control, but use word as an interchange format when stuff goes outside of the company.
  - twakefield 14y ago
    Yes, I completely agree that changing workflow is very difficult and a huge impediment to change. I think many startups (including one of my own) fail because they underestimate the difficulty of changing people's workflow.
- rayiner 14y ago
  The idea that lawyers do things inefficiently on purpose to inflate bills ignores basic Econ 101 principles. Corporate law is a field with dozens of producers and fairly fungible products. If a piece of technology really saved a lot of attorney time, firms would have huge incentive to move to it capture market share against the other producers. What they lost in billable hours on any one matter would be more than offset by additional business gained by offering lower costs at the same billing rate. Moreover, more use of technology increases associate utilization, increase leverage, and helps keep headcount down, which, especially in the last several years, is a key factor in maintaining partner profits. Finally, many of the top firms regularly turn down business because they don't have the capacity--these firms have a lot of incentive to do more with each associate. For things that are truly productivity boosters, like say electronic document review platforms, firms have quickly abandoned old methods and moved to new ones. Lawyers don't use Github for documents for the same reason nobody else uses Github for documents. Corporate America's workflow is based on Word/Excel/etc. There's no good Github-like service for Word/Excel/etc that's appreciably better than passing redlined documents back and forth. There is a business opportunity here for an enterprising engineer... And while you're at it, how about something that's better for marking up documents than a print out and a red pen?
  - twakefield 14y ago
    "The resistance to change is driven by the fact that the majority of lawyers make a lot of money being inefficient." Your comments refuting this are well taken and in hindsight my comment above was cynical and lazy...probably somewhat due to recently paying an enormous legal bill.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      Totally understandable... Legal technology is a fairly interesting sub-field that has implications for corporate administrative technology more generally (at least in larger companies). The document management problem is far from solved, for example. There has been a push towards a more diverse set of legal service offerings. Not every deal needs to be scrutinized in the same way as a mega-merger. But that's something clients have to be on board with--accept more risk for lower cost and faster turn-around. Boutiques are popping up that are offering such services.
- 5vforest 14y ago
  +1. I've recently started to do this for technology Statements of Work in government. If City A writes a Statement of Work for a Wordpress integration, why should City B have to write the same thing? https://github.com/adamjacobbecker/RFP-Library https://github.com/adamjacobbecker/RFP-Library
tawgx 14y ago
If only we could get to a point where we can use these for series A as well. Having to pay $50K for you (and your VC's) legal expenses for an SPA which is 95% boilerplate, is painful and something I pray can get standardized.
- wist105 14y ago
  Agreed. But you gotta start somewhere right?
jpdoctor 14y ago
Would also like to see NDAs, Employment Agreements (and handbooks). It is time that the legal profession joined the 21st century and automates that which can be automated.
gojomo 14y ago
Git & Markdown for legal and government documents could get very interesting. Markdown extensions for inline change-indications may be part of the puzzle as well: http://criticmarkup.com/users-guide.php http://criticmarkup.com/users-guide.php
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  For what it's worth, you may be interested in taking a look at Docracy (http://www.docracy.com/ http://www.docracy.com/), which is doing what you describe.
breck 14y ago
This is really great. One question. I understand that the set of items in these documents is carefully chosen based on many years of experience and thousands of data points. A lawyer could probably take a look at this and understand it in 10 minutes. But for a non lawyer, it seems like too much too soon. I have to figure most companies will need very few of these provisions. Is there a way to structure this type of document so that the most important thing(s) only could be included, perhaps on one page? And then structure it in such a way that every few months, or few years, you add a "plugin" for your particular company needs? My problem with these types of documents is that for 2 guys in a garage they seem to be overkill, and it would be nicer if there were a simpler option that starts with a tiny core that you can then add on as you go.
- jwb119 14y ago
  Thanks for the compliments on the docs, breck. I helped get these up on GitHub and I think the existing document that would come closest to what you're looking for is the term sheet. That's essentially a one page summary of the key terms that are laid out in the other documents. Regarding the "plug in" process you mention, that's actually a good analogy for what happens between these docs, which are used in a seed round, and the larger set of docs that are used in a next round like a Series A. Believe it or not, these Series Seed docs are significantly stripped down from what Series A docs look like. Not sure if that entirely answers your question or not, but let me know if there's anything I can help out with.
  - breck 14y ago
    Thanks for the response Jason, and for the docs. That does answer my question. I guess for me, I see these documents and I am overwhelmed. But that's just probably because it's so foreign to me. I actually was going to say, is there anyway to make these documents more concise like underscore.js? Then I opened up underscore.js in Textmate, hit print, and realized it would be 30 pages printed. I guess I didn't realize how much the perceived length of something depends on the background of the reader. For me, underscore.js is small and concise, for a non programmer it probably looks like a tome. When I saw the Seed docs to me it was a tome, but to you it's probably a quick read. I do wish legal docs were smaller. But I also wish code were smaller. And I don't really have an answer to how to make that so!

70 points by cfield 14y ago

Awesome. I was just commenting to our lawyers the other day how badly the legal industry needs better version control for documents. The existing paradigm is to pay associates $300/hr to pass redlined word documents back and forth or markup docs by hand during phone calls / meetings and then give the hand marked up docs to legal assistants to input changes. Inevitably things get lost in translation and it's difficult to figure out why things changed versions ago. It's also very expensive. The resistance to change is driven by the fact that the majority of lawyers make a lot of money being inefficient. I'm guessing github is not the preferred interface for lawyers but it could very well be the engine behind a more "lawyer friendly" interface. Great to see the seeds of change being sewn, anyways.

jwb119 14y ago
Thanks Taylor! Completely agree with you on your points about lawyer workflow. I'm working on a few things at Fenwick (Series Seed on GitHub is just one) that will hopefully get some of these roadblocks out of the way in the future.
matthewmcg 14y ago
Couldn't agree more. As a working transactional attorney and hobbyist coder, I will say that the obstacle to better workflows is not (in most cases) deliberate inefficiency. Rather, the compensation and billing scheme at nearly all firms strongly discourages investment of time in anything that can't be billed to a specific client. Look for that to change as more firms move to fixed fee work.
DannyBee 14y ago
In a lot of law firms, the resistance to change is simply because completely changing workflows is not easy to accomplish. They have a lot to do, and given their system works for them, you need to demonstrate the advantages for them. Show them why this will make their lives easier. They wouldn't really make less money, since if they are really spending this much time, it's probably time they could spend billing two clients instead of one (usually better to run up two small bills instead of one large one). In any case, this is true in trying to change any enterprise, law is no different. I converted a group of lawyers, who were still using Corel Wordperfect for drafting multistate legislation, to using an XML based workflow, after showing them why it would make them faster, not why it was "better for the world who was trying to look at drafts". Imagine you used emacs all day, every day, and then someone came in and says "we're all moving to VIM". Personally, I do all my drafting in text and use version control, but use word as an interchange format when stuff goes outside of the company.
- twakefield 14y ago
  Yes, I completely agree that changing workflow is very difficult and a huge impediment to change. I think many startups (including one of my own) fail because they underestimate the difficulty of changing people's workflow.
rayiner 14y ago
The idea that lawyers do things inefficiently on purpose to inflate bills ignores basic Econ 101 principles. Corporate law is a field with dozens of producers and fairly fungible products. If a piece of technology really saved a lot of attorney time, firms would have huge incentive to move to it capture market share against the other producers. What they lost in billable hours on any one matter would be more than offset by additional business gained by offering lower costs at the same billing rate. Moreover, more use of technology increases associate utilization, increase leverage, and helps keep headcount down, which, especially in the last several years, is a key factor in maintaining partner profits. Finally, many of the top firms regularly turn down business because they don't have the capacity--these firms have a lot of incentive to do more with each associate. For things that are truly productivity boosters, like say electronic document review platforms, firms have quickly abandoned old methods and moved to new ones. Lawyers don't use Github for documents for the same reason nobody else uses Github for documents. Corporate America's workflow is based on Word/Excel/etc. There's no good Github-like service for Word/Excel/etc that's appreciably better than passing redlined documents back and forth. There is a business opportunity here for an enterprising engineer... And while you're at it, how about something that's better for marking up documents than a print out and a red pen?
- twakefield 14y ago
  "The resistance to change is driven by the fact that the majority of lawyers make a lot of money being inefficient." Your comments refuting this are well taken and in hindsight my comment above was cynical and lazy...probably somewhat due to recently paying an enormous legal bill.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Totally understandable... Legal technology is a fairly interesting sub-field that has implications for corporate administrative technology more generally (at least in larger companies). The document management problem is far from solved, for example. There has been a push towards a more diverse set of legal service offerings. Not every deal needs to be scrutinized in the same way as a mega-merger. But that's something clients have to be on board with--accept more risk for lower cost and faster turn-around. Boutiques are popping up that are offering such services.
5vforest 14y ago
+1. I've recently started to do this for technology Statements of Work in government. If City A writes a Statement of Work for a Wordpress integration, why should City B have to write the same thing? https://github.com/adamjacobbecker/RFP-Library https://github.com/adamjacobbecker/RFP-Library

tawgx 14y ago

If only we could get to a point where we can use these for series A as well. Having to pay $50K for you (and your VC's) legal expenses for an SPA which is 95% boilerplate, is painful and something I pray can get standardized.

wist105 14y ago
Agreed. But you gotta start somewhere right?

jpdoctor 14y ago

Would also like to see NDAs, Employment Agreements (and handbooks). It is time that the legal profession joined the 21st century and automates that which can be automated.

gojomo 14y ago

Git & Markdown for legal and government documents could get very interesting. Markdown extensions for inline change-indications may be part of the puzzle as well: http://criticmarkup.com/users-guide.php http://criticmarkup.com/users-guide.php

chimeracoder 14y ago
For what it's worth, you may be interested in taking a look at Docracy (http://www.docracy.com/ http://www.docracy.com/), which is doing what you describe.

breck 14y ago

This is really great. One question. I understand that the set of items in these documents is carefully chosen based on many years of experience and thousands of data points. A lawyer could probably take a look at this and understand it in 10 minutes. But for a non lawyer, it seems like too much too soon. I have to figure most companies will need very few of these provisions. Is there a way to structure this type of document so that the most important thing(s) only could be included, perhaps on one page? And then structure it in such a way that every few months, or few years, you add a "plugin" for your particular company needs? My problem with these types of documents is that for 2 guys in a garage they seem to be overkill, and it would be nicer if there were a simpler option that starts with a tiny core that you can then add on as you go.

jwb119 14y ago
Thanks for the compliments on the docs, breck. I helped get these up on GitHub and I think the existing document that would come closest to what you're looking for is the term sheet. That's essentially a one page summary of the key terms that are laid out in the other documents. Regarding the "plug in" process you mention, that's actually a good analogy for what happens between these docs, which are used in a seed round, and the larger set of docs that are used in a next round like a Series A. Believe it or not, these Series Seed docs are significantly stripped down from what Series A docs look like. Not sure if that entirely answers your question or not, but let me know if there's anything I can help out with.
- breck 14y ago
  Thanks for the response Jason, and for the docs. That does answer my question. I guess for me, I see these documents and I am overwhelmed. But that's just probably because it's so foreign to me. I actually was going to say, is there anyway to make these documents more concise like underscore.js? Then I opened up underscore.js in Textmate, hit print, and realized it would be 30 pages printed. I guess I didn't realize how much the perceived length of something depends on the background of the reader. For me, underscore.js is small and concise, for a non programmer it probably looks like a tome. When I saw the Seed docs to me it was a tome, but to you it's probably a quick read. I do wish legal docs were smaller. But I also wish code were smaller. And I don't really have an answer to how to make that so!