"The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/paradigm_shift/

by grellas • 15 years ago

152 110 15 years ago

abajournal.com

tomjen3• 15 years ago

I hope so - lawyers are way, way too expensive.

guelo• 15 years ago

Tell me about it, I just had an associate at a big SF law firm quote me $510/hr.

gamble• 15 years ago

The problem is that law school is an absurdly expensive exercise that, incredibly, doesn't actually teach graduates how to practice law. How else can you explain the fact that there are tons of unemployed JDs out there, and yet the average citizen can't afford basic legal services?

chopsueyar2• 15 years ago

Would allowing non-JD degree holders to take the bar help?

lionhearted• 15 years ago

Yes, but the legal profession has incredible sway and power, so that won't happen.

It would absolutely be possible for someone to specialize in just a single specific kind of law, become very knowledgeable about it, and make normal skilled professional money in the $25 to $75 per hour range. This is prohibited by regulation and licensing which amounts to a huge windfall for the legal profession.

But it's unlikely to change, because the last thing any legislator wants is to be on unfavorable terms with the legal profession.

Bobby_Tables• 15 years ago

Depends on how you define "help". The reason there are so many unemployed JDs is that there are too many lawyers, and allowing people who didn't go to law school to take bar exams would make that problem even worse.

On the other hand, if people could become lawyers without taking on $100,000 in not-dischargeable-under-any-circumstances debt, they would be able to make a living at a much more reasonable salary than is currently necessary, which would allow the market for legal services to start correcting itself.

What really needs to happen is that the bar pass rate needs to be lowered significantly in markets that are over-saturated (pretty much any big city). It should probably even be lowered to zero (ie stop offering the bar exam) for a couple of years in states like New York.

sixtofour• 15 years ago

Something like this is already established practice. In some states you need a lawyer involved with every real estate transaction, because it's considered "practicing law."

In some other states, like Colorado, a lawyer does not have to be involved in a real estate transaction. In these states real estate agents have been granted the right to practice this very limited segment of law. They don't take the bar, they just go through real estate school (easy and minimal), take a test (easy), and keep up minimal continuing education.

So that's a very narrow slice of law, practiced by non-lawyer specialists.

In these states you can, if you want, still involve a lawyer, and in some cases it's probably a really good idea. In most suburban lot/block transactions it's probably not necessary, but IANAL.

chopsueyar2• 15 years ago

Khan Academy Law School?

sunchild13• 15 years ago

Law School doesn't really teach what lawyers need to practice law. I've been tempted to do some videos on open source compliance, basics of contract negotiations, etc. but I just don't have enough time to do everything I want to! Maybe if someone else wants to collaborate, I would make it more of a priority.

ovi256• 15 years ago

Those would be extremely useful, thanks for thinking about them.

praptak• 15 years ago

Shrinking market for legal services is good news to me. People becoming less litigious? It is actually possible to do anything without a highly paid expert to tell you whether you're not breaking some complicated law? Does not sound like something to worry about.

Robin_Message• 15 years ago

The market is not shrinking; the problem is access to justice for ordinary people who cannot afford $500 an hour. Also, perverse incentives like "No win, no fee" encourage settlements and litigation without helping those who have been genuinely wronged or have an actual case that needs to go to trial.

gjm11• 15 years ago

How does no-win-no-fee do that? If you haven't been genuinely wronged and don't have an actual case that needs to go to trial, you can't realistically expect to win, so NWNF doesn't make much difference.

What NWNF is supposed to do is to make it possible for the not-rich to afford to defend themselves when wronged (either by taking legal action, or by declining to settle unfavourably when threatened with legal action). That doesn't seem terribly perverse, it's the opposite of "encouraging settlements", and it does help those who have been genuinely wronged.

The downside is that lawyers operating on a NWNF basis may be unwilling to take on any case whose prospects for success are poor. I suppose that might count as "encouraging settlements" -- in cases where you're not very likely to win and can't afford to pay the legal fees. I have trouble seeing why that is a bad thing.

What am I missing?

noonespecial3• 15 years ago

“The biggest problem,” says Ury, “is that ordinary citizens cannot afford to hire a lawyer. The bread and butter of small firm practices are criminal defense work, wills and trusts, leases, closings and divorces. Yet in Connecticut, 80 to 85 percent of divorces have a self-represented party because most families can’t afford to hire one lawyer, let alone two. Nearly 90 percent of criminal cases are self-represented or by a public defender because families can’t scrape together a retainer.”

I'd call that a 100%, red-line, sirens-blaring, system failure. "Less people are hiring us for $500/hour! What shall we do?" might not be the right question. "Why did anyone ever do so in the first place?" might be closer.

swampthing4• 15 years ago

I hope you don't take this as a flippant comment, because it isn't meant to be, but the answer to your latter question is - it's what the market bears (or did bear).

There's plenty of lawyers out there - but, like in programming, there are a lot fewer good ones. In general, people are willing to pay $500 / hour because they can't find one of similar quality for a lower price.

sunchild13• 15 years ago

Quality is very, very difficult to measure in this context. It's a bit like measuring the quality of a doctor or other professional whose advice you need to trust beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In the end, law firms tend to trade on longstanding reputation, which is a fine, but imperfect, way of handling this problem. These days, there is no reason to assume that high rates == quality, or vice versa.

The market will sort this out eventually: right now clients are making pricing demands on big law firms that are cutting their margins significantly. As a result, firms are ditching costs in a kind of emergency sale. My own opinion is that many firms are gutting their best assets (their new, young lawyers) in order to preserve the partner profits, and that will be their downfall. Meanwhile, the next generation of lawyers will be free to charge much less, and will actually make more money.

noonespecial3• 15 years ago

Oh, I know the market bore it and then some. The question is why? And more importantly, was it an isolated fluke of an economy/politic gone crazy? If so, its about to correct fiercely and get a little extra kick from a frustrated populace who rightly felt that access to justice was snatched from them.

We still find people representing themselves because they can't "scrape together a retainer". They're not trying to hire $500/hour guys. They'd hire anyone that'd take their case for what they had. The law has become so twisted that its genuinely long, hard work just to get a case together and get in the door. There's a minimum barrier to entry that the average joe just can't meet and the most inexpensive of lawyers can't make a living doing. The work is too much and the people have too little. Its not the lawyers. The whole system is failing. Its just failing from the bottom up. Its only just now effecting the $500/hour level.

If a few poor people here and there end up representing themselves its no big deal. They just operate at a huge disadvantage and get screwed. If most people are forced to represent themselves or go with an overworked public defender the whole system will crack into to very distinct parts.

OstiaAntica• 15 years ago

Most legal work isn't a market, it is a racket. Lawyers in Congress and state houses write deliberately complex, yet often vague, "laws" in order to create business for their pals in the legal guild (where they typically join them after the law passes). They also design various malpractice laws and penalties to generate huge payouts to the legal suits. From health care to IP to shareholder issues, "Lawyer up!" is the intentional purpose of U.S. public policy.

geebee• 15 years ago

One huge difference is that the practice of law is still controlled by a professional association that many people feel behaves like a cartel. Anyone is free to read an online python book, install mysql, and hang out a shingle as a web programmer. In my opinion, that's a really good thing.

There's a lot of disagreement around "scope" - some people are actually opposed to almost any restriction of practice, even in areas like medicine and law. Other people want to see similar associations/cartels (depending on your point of view) set up for software development. There's also a big middle ground, people who do see a justification for credentialing and licensing in some cases, but who think that the scope of what requires a license has expanded far beyond what was reasonable and needed to protect the public. I tend to fall in the middle group, but with a high degree of suspicion of cartels.

There's also some funny business on the demand side for law. America's truly byzantine tax code, for instance, provides lots of employment for $500/hr lawyers. Imagine if programmers could mandate that all code had to be written in the most bloated enterprise java possible, and had to be written by people with three year graduate degrees from programs largely inaccessible to international students. This would include many tasks that could otherwise have been handled by smart people with no degree who read the book. Anyone who didn't comply could be prevented by legal force from practicing, or even sent to prison. Now you'd have something comparable to the legal profession.

iwwr• 15 years ago

It's not just a lawyer failure, but a legal system collapse. People are being denied justice.

The lawyers themselves are not necessarily to blame. There are two or three interlinked aspects:

1. The growth in regulations, which draws away limited legal resources toward big companies, leaving less (or higher fees) for criminal or civil defense

2. The growth in criminal prosecution of victimless crimes and especially ramping up the war on drugs

3. The collusion between politicians and the prison industry, which has created a monetary incentive to incarcerate people (looking 'tough on crime' has more than just electoral benefits)

asciilifeform• 15 years ago

> It's not just a lawyer failure, but a legal system collapse. People are being denied justice.

Very true:

"The American justice system favors the educated, the corporations, and the rich, and takes unfair advantage of the uneducated, the private citizen, and the poor. It would seem that almost any legal entanglement can be resolved through the judicious application of money, while almost any tussle with the law can result in financial penalties and even imprisonment for those who are forced to rely on public defenders. Many people naïvely believe that a criminal is someone who commits a criminal act. This is not true, at least not in the American system of justice. Here, a criminal is someone who has been accused of committing a criminal act, tried for it, and found guilty. Whether or not that person has in fact committed the act is immaterial: witnesses may lie, evidence can be fabricated, juries can be manipulated. A person who has committed a criminal act but has not been tried for it, or has been tried and exonerated, is not a criminal, and for anyone to call him a criminal is libelous. It therefore follows that, within the American justice system, committing a crime and getting away with it is substantially identical to not committing a crime at all. Wealthy clients have lawyers who are constantly testing and, whenever possible, expanding the bounds of legality. Corporations have entire armies of lawyers, and can almost always win against individuals. Furthermore, corporations use their political influence to promote the use of binding arbitration, which favors them, as the way to resolve disputes. This state of affairs makes it hopelessly naïve for anyone to confuse legality with morality, ethics, or justice. You should always behave in a legal manner, but this will not necessarily save you from going to jail. In what manner you choose to behave legally is between you and your conscience, God, or lawyer, if you happen to have one, and may or may not have anything to do with obeying laws. Legality is a property of the justice system, while justice is an ancient virtue. This distinction is lost on very few people: most people possess a sense of justice, and, separate from it, an understanding of what is legal, and what they they can get away with. The U.S. legal system, as it stands, is a luxury, not a necessity. It is good to those who can afford it, and bad for those who cannot. As ever-increasing numbers of people find that they cannot pay what it takes to secure a good outcome for themselves, they will start to see it not as a system of justice, but as a tool of oppression, and will learn to avoid it rather than to look to it for help. As oppression becomes the norm, at some point the pretense to serving justice will be dispensed with in favor of a much simpler, efficient, streamlined system of social control, perhaps one based on martial law. People have been known to get along quite happily without written law, lawyers, courts, or jails. Societies always evolve an idea of what is forbidden, and find ways to punish those who transgress. In the absence of an official system of justice, people generally become much more careful around each other, because running afoul of someone may lead to a duel or give rise to a vendetta, and because, in the absence of jails, punishments tend become draconian, coming to include dispossession, banishment, and even death, which are all intended to deter and to neutralize rather than to punish. When disputes do arise, lay mediators or councils may be appealed to, to help resolve them. The transition to a lower-energy system of jurisprudence will no doubt be quite tumultuous, but there is something we can be sure of: many laws will become unenforceable at its very outset. This development, given our definition of what is criminal, will de facto decriminalize many types of behavior, opening new, relatively safe avenues of legal behavior for multitudes of people, creating new opportunities for the wise, and further tempting the evil and the foolish. As a safety precaution, you might want to distance yourself from the legal system, and, to the extent that this is possible, find your own justice. As an exercise, examine each of your relationships that is based on a contract, lease, deed, license, promissory note, or other legal instrument, and look for ways to replace it with relationships that are based on trust, mutual respect, and common interest. Think of ways to make these relationships work within the context of friendships and familial ties. To protect yourself from getting savaged by the justice system as it degenerates into oppression, try to weave a thick web of informal interdependency all around you, where any conflict or disagreement can be extinguished by drawing in more and more interested parties, all of them eager to resolve it peaceably, and none of them willing to let it escalate beyond their midst. Struggle for impartiality when attempting to mediate disputes, and be guided by your wisdom and your sense of justice rather than by laws, rules, or precedents, which offer poor guidance in changing times."

- From "Thriving in the Age of Collapse" by Dmitry Orlov (https://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dtxqwqr_19gjjvp8)

marshray2• 15 years ago

It's not just a lawyer failure, but a legal system collapse. People are being denied justice. The lawyers themselves are not necessarily to blame.

Then who else is to blame? Nearly everyone with in the system with significant decision authority is either an active member of the bar or was before they became a politician.

Voters? Perhaps. But usually the choice is between two lawyers.

roel_v• 15 years ago

""Why did anyone ever do so in the first place?" might be closer."

I'm interpreting this as "why would we need lawyers, we did fine without them", but that is very untrue. In the past there simply was much less rule of law, with the cronyism and systemic state of fear of citizens that follows from it; as is still the case in most of the Third World and especially in places like China and Russia. But to a lesser degree also in Westerns countries in Europe and the US, and especially in places and/or social strata that don't trust the legal system, or where those who are supposed to uphold the law are corrupt.

Lawyers may seem to be a net tax on the system, and the rule of law could theoretically exist without lawyers, true; but history has proven that systems where people have access to specialists who can fight for their rights are more efficient and, more importantly, better to live in than others.

gaustin• 15 years ago

I think what was intended was "Why did anyone ever hire us for $500/hour in the first place?"

I'm not the author of the post, so I'm not authoritative but that would be my reading.

chollida12• 15 years ago

> I'd call that a 100%, red-line, sirens-blaring, system failure. "Less people are hiring us for $500/hour! What shall we do?" might not be the right question. "Why did anyone ever do so in the first place?" might be closer.

I've heard the reason described as such:

"People will pay the highest possible amount they can afford for things like doctors and lawyers because if there is a screw up they die or go to jail.

When the stakes are so high you pay the most you possibly can to ensure, to the best of your ability, the best possible outcome for yourself."

Atleast this line of thinking makes sense to me. If I'm ever up on trial for something that could send me to jail, you can bet I'll spend every penny I have to ensure that I'm found innocent.

hugh3• 15 years ago

This explains some of it. It doesn't explain why I need to pay $500 an hour (well, $300 an hour) to get a lawyer to look over the contract when I buy a house. I'm not too concerned about having the best possible lawyer in that case -- as long as I have a vaguely competent lawyer (the same way I want, say, a vaguely competent taxi driver or a vaguely competent waiter) I should be fine.

ph0rque2• 15 years ago

What would be really nice is if law was machine-readable (and interpretable). But that would probably require computers being able to understand language.

noonespecial3• 15 years ago

That'd be a neat trick. Not even the humans can understand legal language. Perhaps the singularity begins with an expert system suddenly grokking the entirety of law, resolving the paradoxes and contradictions, and then suing all humanity for infringement. Hard-takeoff trolling...

thret• 15 years ago

If that isn't already a science fiction short story, it should be.

swampthing4• 15 years ago

There's projects on this - one of the best known ones (to my knowledge) is the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse Project:

http://www.lexmachina.org/

sunchild13• 15 years ago

Yes, litigation and compliance tend to lead the way when it comes to extracting meaning from legal data pools. In my opinion, the single biggest obstacle to getting legal knowledge to play nice with software is the fact that it is all "silo'ed" due to: (1) being in MS Word format, (2) being confidential information, and (3) the lack of conventions/standards in legal documents.

The good news, though, is that legal documents tend to follow a fairly narrow channel of variations, when isolated to particular practice areas (e.g., leases, sales of goods, service agreements, motions, etc.)

I've always wanted to run a huge number of documents through Beyesian filters or something similar to develop some interesting classification rules, but it's damn hard to get a pool of representative documents that isn't strictly confidential.

etherael7• 15 years ago

What's an interesting segue to this is that fundamentally the "language understanding" issues are mostly red herrings. The gold standard within the legal profession we are constantly led to believe is to pursue a standard of objective fairness and justice which would be better defined by deterministic, logical languages like programming languages rather than fuzzy, broad languages like English.

It is far, far easier to have laws written in code and execute test cases based on those laws before even investing any capital into a venture which may require edge cases of a given law, rather than the current scenario of hemming and hawing around a fundamentally subjective and fuzzy area and eventually subjecting your endeavour to the rigors of being a legal "test case" consisting of much ado about nothing and the outcome is as close to random as anything else.

When you reduce the legal profession to coding and writing test cases though, hell will freeze over the next day. Such a politically powerful faction will never allow themselves to be marginalised in this way, even if they claim to desperately be striving for exactly the kind of scenarios that this would allow; universal access to a completely objective justice system with etc etc etc. The extent to which this is actually impossible is somewhat depressing because it's something of an expose on the hypocrisy implicit in the claims of the legal system to actually serve the public, rather than itself.

But hey, that's life. If it ever does happen my wager is it will be because it is forced on them through market forces, the public at large simply uses alternatives venues for mediation and the legal system is forced to compete with it. I predict much artificial legal protection to prevent this from happening before it actually comes to pass, though.

jgfoot2• 15 years ago

Although there are some laws that can kind of be represented as computer code (for example, TurboTax captures a good portion of the tax code, and programming a 55 mph speed limit into a car shouldn't be hard) for the most part the law acts as a system for delegating to judges limited authority to exercise discretion. Ultimately, the decisions are made through that discretion, and they aren't entirely predictable. If you haven't already, take 30 minutes and read Oliver Wendell Holmes' "The Path of the Law" and see if you still think the only obstacle to mechanizing the law is the political power of the legal profession. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2373

scythe2• 15 years ago

>a standard of objective fairness and justice which would be better defined by deterministic, logical languages like programming languages rather than fuzzy, broad languages like English.

Can you formally define concepts and events occurring in a "fuzzy, broad" world in a useful way? It is kind of amusing to imagine that someone out there is sitting around with a recursively-enumerable objective statement of what constitutes fairness.

jacques_chester5• 15 years ago

When I was a law student, I think as you do: the law could be better replaced with code.

Now that I am a software engineer, I don't think that any more.

Though law and code have a lot of similarities: http://skepticlawyer.com.au/2011/06/27/the-art-of-law/

thwarted2• 15 years ago

That is kind of what we were heading towards in another thread from another post [1].

There seem to be a lot of law/lawyer related posts in past week.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693432

lhnn3• 15 years ago

Prolog: The language of lawyers.

wooUK• 15 years ago

I've spent the past 10 years working in global corporate law firms as a software developer and have witnessed this change first hand. The legal profession is based around chargeable hours. This is not a good deal for the consumer of legal services. Billing by the hour does not encourage lawyers to work more efficiently or effectively, in fact it rewards the opposite. Recently larger clients have started to stand up to the legal firms and demand that work should be done on a fixed fee basis or a shared risk/reward basis. Suddenly lawyers are beginning to to act like business people and are looking at improving their own internal efficiencies now that their fees are capped. One example of this are lawyers trying to empathise more with their fixed fee clients' business strategy and point out legal pitfalls before they happen - wow a proactive lawyer! Observing how much money law firms are currently investing on improving their efficiencies then I think what we are witnessing is a shift to a new model and not just a blip.

sunchild13• 15 years ago

Based on your experience, I'd love to chat with you offline. My law firm (together with another firm in London) is building software for deal lawyers. If you're interested in meeting, you can reach me via the email address on my firm's page: http://yusonirvine.com/

If nothing else, I'd like to introduce you to my UK counterparts.

VanL5• 15 years ago

Interesting - I would be interested in chatting with you too. I am a lawyer at a Big law firm. One of the things that I have been doing (which clients love) is writing software to automate or enhance parts of what I do.

swampthing4• 15 years ago

This article is spot-on (I'm one of the few on HN that have worked as an attorney in biglaw).

One theme it barely touched is that, like any other technology, legal innovations inevitably get commoditized. Fundamentally, law firms have been unable to properly adjust to this commoditization due to a lack of technology (outsourcing is a short term solution). The only solutions they come up with are to cut overhead costs, which only gets you so far.

The big picture for the legal industry, is that you have extremely bright young people fleeing the industry because this lack of technology forces them to do this mundane commoditized work. And like any commoditized product, the basis for competition ends up on price, which ends up just forcing these people to handle intense amounts of mundane commoditized work. This is obviously not sustainable, if you want to maintain a law firm with the best and brightest legal minds. It's my observation though, that most partners in a position to do anything either do not see this or do not care (because they'll be gone by the time things fall apart anyways).

sunchild13• 15 years ago

Exactly! What I've learned, though, is that there is always a need for a human being at the end of the process. That's where lawyers will always be needed: to exercise nuanced judgment that just cannot be systematized (yet). The trick is to be a lawyer who can work as part of a bigger process that includes smart technologies and less expensive (and perhaps, less skilled) labor.

VanL5• 15 years ago

This is right - there is always a need for humans at the end of the process. The problem is, though, that in traditional law firms many things that can be done by computers are done by humans. This has a couple of effects:

1. Soul-sucking work. Want to know why so many lawyers hate what they do? Because they are doing stuff that computers can do better and faster. It kills initiative, creativity, and any sense of joy.

2. Higher bills for clients. This is all done by the billable hour, so having humans do lots of soul-sucking work is extremely lucrative. We recently had a massive all-hands-on doc review that needed to be done over the course of about three days. For those three days with everyone (and I do mean everyone) doing it, the firm billed $MM/hour in aggregate.

sunchild13• 15 years ago

I live and breathe this topic. After 12 years at big law firms in NYC, myself and a collection of our best and brightest broke off and founded our own firms (mine in NYC, another in London).

This is actually very relevant to the HN community, because it's all about how to run a business. The problem with legal services begins and ends with poor business practices.

Law firms are addicted to covering their own lack of spending discipline by raising their hourly rates and pushing attorneys to bill clients more for less value. The "solutions" that they're undertaking now (cutting associate salaries, etc.) are equally wrong-headed.

Four years ago, I was making $400K+ at a top law firm. When I became eligible for partnership at my firm, I decided to leave instead. Why? Because I did not want to own a tiny amount of equity in a poorly-run business. Down the hall from me were several men in their mid-eighties who were drawing $1MM+ pensions and turning up for work two days a week. They had teams of secretaries who printed off their email and read them a digest each morning. I watched the firm spend, spend, spend to recruit "the best and the brightest" from Ivy League schools. After those new lawyers were hired, they would be put to work doing tasks that any decent temp worker could do. Young attorneys were being billed out at $500+ per hour and pressured to make their minimum hourly quotas every year. Our offices were expensive. Our parties were expensive. The I.T. support was expensive because it had painted itself into vendor lock-in and a huge (and useless) support staff. I flew first class everywhere. I stayed in the Four Seasons for months on end.

Sounds great, right? Nope – not when you're considering becoming an owner of that company. I saw the writing on the wall. Clients were bailing. They were getting better at doing my job with in house people. They were pressuring firm management to write off big bills and compete in RFPs.

So I got out, and I've never looked back. I did it because I think I can run a business better than they do. I did it because I actually care about whether my clients feel like they've gotten their money's worth. Also, I did it because I wanted to build an IT platform for lawyers that wasn't hampered by incompetent IT staff and poorly-chosen, expensive solutions.

Today, I have many of the same clients that I had back then. My clients are some of the biggest names in their field, and they stuck with me instead of sticking with the big name law firms. When my clients ask me to quote a fixed price for my work on a project, I give them a reasonable fixed price because I can afford to do that. I have low overhead (ridiculously low, actually). I can provide better service than ever before, because I have better tools at my disposal. I don't waste time fighting my way through clumsy solutions like Sharepoint, Deltaview, Worksite, or whatever other POS is in vogue at big law firms today.

I could go on about this forever, but suffice it to say that this article and the phenomenon behind it is extremely interesting to me. I also think it's a great case study for entrepreneurs. Think of it this way: what if your target market was dominated by companies that charge way too much, are extremely inefficient, and are carrying a huge, ever-growing cost basis? Sounds like a good opportunity, right? Well, it is!

127001brewer• 15 years ago

I can provide better service than ever before, because I have better tools at my disposal.

Can you go into more detail about the tools you use?

This seems like a good opportunity (as a software product) for selling to smaller firms.

sunchild13• 15 years ago

I typically represent customers in contract negotiations with their upstream suppliers. That means I do lots of deals with many of the same names on the other side of the table, again and again (Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc.)

After over a decade of doing this, I notice that my clients really want the answer to two questions:

1. What are the market standard terms for the transaction?

2. What did we (i.e., the client) agree to in the past?

In big law firms, the answer to these two questions is all too often locked into silos. Either knowledge of past deals is hidden from software because it's buried in MS format binary files, or it's buried in someone's head. It's quite common to see intraoffice communiqués go out by email: "Has anyone done XYZ for ABC in the past?" You might get a few responses...or none at all. It's very spotty, and not a good way to build institutional knowledge. At some firms, there might be a Sharepoint or Lotus Notes "knowledgebase" (ugh!), but those are often next to useless and involve a lot of manual human overhead to maintain.

When people think of technologies to enable deal law practice, they often go straight for document assembly or document management. Document assembly and templating is a bore, IMO. It's an area that is already too full of competitors who are trying to solve problems that I don't actually have. Since I tend to represent customers, I don't usually get to create the first draft of the contract. I've actually built a custom document repository with some nice features (e.g., email dropboxes, etc.) but that's just housekeeping, IMO. The real magic lies elsewhere...

In my view, the "document-oriented" viewpoint is the wrong way to approach these problems. Instead, law firms and their clients should be looking ways to break down the document barriers and convert contracts into seamless, actionable data.

Litigation, and patent/corporate due diligence are currently ahead of my practice area in this respect. My practice area (commercial transactions) involves a completely different set of problems and skills, and is an emerging market for technology applications. I'm biased, but I think my practice is harder to commoditize than, say, searching through millions of emails to find phrase matches or potentially privileged communications.

Since leaving big law, I've worked with other lawyers to develop systems for extracting and archiving the information we need to answer the two big questions: What did the client do in the past, and what is everybody else in the market doing today?

Other areas where we use/develop technology in ways that big firms can't:

- Task assignment systems for delegating work to non-lawyers or offshore lawyers, while retaining a clear, auditable record of who did what. Think project checklist templates similar to Basecamp, but more focused on our use cases.

- Interfaces to our timekeeping APIs (Harvest and Freshbooks) for custom reporting/visualization on how we spend our time. This helps us accurately quote fixed fees for projects, and surfaces interesting data about role in the contracting process.

It's a really interesting area. If you're involved in it at all, get in touch with me. I love talking about it with people who "get it". I'm a coder and a lawyer, so I'm perpetually stuck in both (and neither) of the two worlds of law and coding.

ronp2• 15 years ago

Absolutely! BigLaw is (was?) a house of cards waiting for the right circumstances to blow it over. My law practice is only part time, and I run it like my software company operates - lean, innovative and hellbent on providing really good value for clients. I have more than enough legal clients in the pipeline to keep me busy and my startup background gives me a great foundation for advising my target clients. As for tools to run my practice, if I can't get what I need at a reasonable price I build it and make it available to my colleagues at a reasonable price.

sunchild13• 15 years ago

You sound like my kind of lawyer. We should be organizing like-minded lawyers and forcing changes on a bigger scale.

Please get in touch with me. My firm's homepage should appear in my profile.

maxxxxx2• 15 years ago

I am waiting for the day when there are laywers in single practice who charge rates of less than $100/hr like many other professionals do. I know some laywers who are complaining about tough times but they still think they are worth $250/hr.

a3camero5• 15 years ago

To play devil's lawyer: lawyers have very high fixed costs due to insurance + bar fees. In Ontario they're about $6k a year. Database subscriptions are also very pricey. The expenses are considerably higher than that associated with programming.

maxxxxx2• 15 years ago

Somehow I doubt that these fixed costs justify $250/hr vs $100/hr. But I am not 100% sure.

grellas• 15 years ago

Having been in Big Law myself, I have previously set forth my thoughts at some length on this topic (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648342).

Fundamentally, law remains a guild system, with the governing licensing restrictions severely limiting the ability to innovate. Only licensed persons can be owners of firms and only licensed persons can provide the key services. No fee-splitting or profit sharing is permitted with any person who is not licensed. Even one who is licensed is limited is performing services other than in the locale for which he is licensed. All of this may be well and good for "maintaining standards," as the bar associations say, but it means this is and will remain a closed profession that remains remote and removed from average people.

This is not a knock on professionalism. A really good lawyer is well worth the price, even at high rates, for many business transactions. But making services broadly affordable remains a challenge. Technology can help as long as the laws bend enough to allow firms to adopt innovative business models taking advantage of it - how far this can go will ultimately depend on the rules of the guild.

sunchild13• 15 years ago

This is a great comment, but one nitpick: "No fee-splitting or profit sharing is permitted with any person who is not licensed."

I believe this is no longer the case the UK and some other places.

lhnn3• 15 years ago

Fair enough, and perhaps your comment is a sign of change. However, though this is a global forum, the source article is from the American Bar Association.

JoeAltmaier• 15 years ago

A model of circuitous legal babbling. It took until the 34th paragraph to spit out the crux of the argument. Save you time, here it is:

1) More sophisticated clients armed with more information and greater market power to rein in costs.

2) A globalized economy, which increases the complexity of legal work while exposing U.S. lawyers to greater competition.

3) Powerful information technology that can automate or replace many of the traditional, billable functions performed by lawyers.

asr• 15 years ago

This article correctly points out that pricing for legal services is undergoing a shift toward the true marginal cost for the service. So the law firm business model where much of partners’ profits are markups on simple, repetitive work done by junior associates is on its way out.

That said, the doom and gloom of this article (and much of the profession) is overblown. Maybe it’s because law is such a conservative profession, but any change is greeted as if it were the coming of the Four Horsemen. It’s as if the entire software industry spent its time worrying about how the internet was going to put Windows programmers out of business, instead of being excited about the opportunities it presented.

Major law firms are filled with smart and experienced lawyers who actually provide a lot of value to their clients. That value is still worthwhile--as the article points out, the rule of law is not going away.

As a law school student, I'm not (unduly) worried about this. Sure, there will be some winners and losers, but that’s what happens in business--and basically what this is about is that law firms are looking more like businesses. Why should I expect anyone to feel sorry for me because of that?

ahi2• 15 years ago

JACK CADE. Be brave, then; for your captain is brave, and vows reformation. There shall be in England seven half-penny loaves sold for a penny: the three-hoop'd pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer: all the realm shall be in common; and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass: and when I am king,- as king I will be,-

ALL. God save your majesty!

JACK CADE. I thank you, good people:- there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree like brothers, and worship me their lord.

DICK. The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.

JACK CADE. Nay, that I mean to do. Is not this a lamentable thing, that of the skin of an innocent lamb should be made parchment? that parchment, being scribbled o'er, should undo a man? Some say the bee stings: but I say, 'tis the bee's wax; for I did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.- How now! who's there?

http://www.spectacle.org/797/finkel.html

ahi2• 15 years ago

I wonder, not relevant enough or is the liberal arts education of hackernews so lacking we don't know Shakespeare when we see it?

civilian• 15 years ago

"The first thing we do, let's digitalize all the lawyers."

DrManhattan2• 15 years ago

Well I fucking hope so.

RMZahorsky• 15 years ago

We're enjoying the substantive conversation this story has generated over at the ABA Journal! I've been jotting down future story ideas based on some of the comments and invite anyone to send insights and tips to Rachel.Zahorsky@AmericanBar.org. - Rachel M. Zahorsky, Legal Affairs Writer

arihersh• 15 years ago

This is an absolutely fascinating thread-- thanks to Rachel Zahorsky for the original article, and to sunchild and other commenters for thoughts and inspiration. Am very interested in contacting others on this list with an interest in both law and code.

I recently wrote about version control and law on quora: http://b.qr.ae/kRgGyk, and about 'open sourcing' access to the tax code here: http://blog.tabulaw.com/2011/06/open-source-tax-code.html.

"The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

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