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I can see this being big, It makes me wonder about the very long term. Saying that it's a tool meant to be used by lawyers is fine, but it's going to be fairly
by pmichaud 11y ago
I can see this being big, It makes me wonder about the very long term.
Saying that it's a tool meant to be used by lawyers is fine, but it's going to be fairly obvious to any lawyer who thinks about it for a moment that that is basically bullshit.
The play is pretty obvious:
Phase 1: Lawyers use the service as a workflow tool.
Phase 2: The tool gets good enough to mostly not need the lawyers. They enjoy a brief period in which their income is essentially automated.
Phase 3: Companies use the service as a lawyer, lawyers only used in extraordinary circumstances.
A big part of the lawyer's value proposition is about liability/peace of mind. Like, "I'm sure this NDA is solid because if it's not I have someone to sue, the guy who wrote it, my lawyer." That's a valuable service, which is why they will stay in the picture during phase 3--essentially a liability limiting sign off.
Im sure you've thought about that, as your business model sort of hinges on having the lawyer take all the liability. Ie, the documents you provide are just "suggestions" or boilerplate for a professional to base their work off of, and those professionals are the ones who are actually liable for mistakes or oversights. It makes sense.
(Sidenote: I predict some hostility from lawyers here, similar to the hostility in the design profession over stuff like 99designs. I don't think it'll matter though. They will be hostile because they know that the tool, if it becomes widespread, would drastically reduce the number of lawyers who can work in the area, but they will each be incentivized to use the tools individually because it'll save them time in their practice as they all race for the bottom, hoping that they are one of the few left standing in the aftermath.)
Anyway, you'll have access to a very large dataset of those potential mistakes and oversights plus the tactics that work to solve them, and you'll be able to hone the tool so that they become more and more rare (this is phase 2 from above).
But the thing I wonder about is what the second order effects will be. Let's say we're in a world in which Ironclad has won, and millions of businesses use it for the legal needs.
In that world you have drastically fewer lawyers handling more clients because the work is essentially automated and they are sign signing off. Each lawyer probably still makes the same money overall since the revenue per client is much lower.
At some point something will go wrong, and the lawyer will be on the hook for having screwed up. And he'll say "Wait a minute, I'm not the one who screwed up. I used the Microsoft of legal services, the one you can't get fired for choosing, the huge goliath that lowly me could never hope to question because they have the most legal expertise in the world. I used Ironclad. They said this document was right, who am I to say otherwise? I trusted them, and they are the ones who screwed up."
And at first it won't matter. That's not how professional liability works, so that lawyer will get ground up in the gears. Maybe the scrappy ones will sue you, and you'll take your knocks, mostly winning or settling.
But I wonder if maybe when there's an army of rubber stampers who are essentially not doing anything except saying "If Ironclad screwed up this document, then I'll take the fall," then with enough case law the environment will change, and somehow Ironclad actually would be saddled with a greater proportion of the liability? Normally I imagine things like that wouldn't work because no one will fight enough to place the liability where it probably belongs, but in this case you'll be up against LAWYERS, whose profession it is to deal with and fight for/against laws. That might make a difference in the very long term.
Anyway, it'd be a good problem to have since it would mean you won like 20 years ago. Good luck guys, I think it'll be big!
- GFischer 11y agoMany people have just become liability signees - architects and structural engineers come to mind. I know a structural engineer whose job is to run building parameters across a special tool / model (which sometimes takes days to run), then adds a 20% padding to the values it returns and signs off the document. Many architects, especially in my country where they're extremely badly paid and undervalued, are pressed into just signing plans with no input.
- zekevermillion 11y agoAs a lawyer, I look forward to that brief period of automated income! But seriously, I think that there will always be a role for advice on novel issues, and good lawyers prefer to be in that niche rather than spending all our time mastering the ins and outs of Word macros. The problem is that people look to corporate lawyers for two very different services -- legal advice, and business process. Legal advice is very difficult, and I would argue, impossible to automate. Business process can and should be automated. It does not make sense to rely on highly trained humans for routine business process.
- rayiner 11y agoSoftware isn't going to diligence your IPO any time soon. And as high as legal fees might seem, at least for the medium size to large firms, the money isn't really made doing routine easily automated work for small companies.