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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 t

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

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