Ask HN: What can a startup do to help fix law for the average person?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3646003

by DividesByZero • 14 years ago

4 14 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

The law is very difficult for the average user. Legal fees are extreme to the point of pricing many potential users out, and the incentives for legal firms often aren't aligned with the best outcomes for clients and the interests of justice.

Many of these issues affect startups and entrepreneurs - patent issues, financial law, contract law - founders find themselves unable to fight battles that they ostensibly should be able to win according to the law, but cannot afford to fund.

These pain points seem like potential opportunities for a startup to turn into an opportunity.What could actually be accomplished by a startup in the legal space, and what kind of effort and resources would it take?

duncan_bayne• 14 years ago

Find a way to end the lawyer cartel: http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=51

Good luck with that :-/

DividesByZero3• 14 years ago

The formation of a cartel indicates market failure. The source of this is usually due to some property of the good or service.

In that link, the property appears to be the licensing of legal practitioners as a sign of competence to represent clients, but it does not address the structure of incentives around providing the service of practicing law. What properties could a disruptive business exploit to improve the situation?

kristenlee3• 14 years ago

As a Harvard Law School graduate I want to say that the OP is really underestimating the skill set of lawyers, the law is a very difficult field and the suggestion that it is a cartel is a little overblown. Every legal issue is different, no two divorces are the same, no two lawsuits are the same, no two patent disputes are the same. This is why you don't really see a Dreamweaver/Weebly type app for web application development, no two web applications are the same and each one has different needs and challenges that require the skills of a computer engineer to work out. Same way for the law. The underlying attitude in Silicon Valley that "every problem can be solved with a web app" just does not hold true in the real world, especially for hard problems such as America's legal system.

DividesByZero3• 14 years ago

I'm not suggesting something like an app to solve legal problem just by plugging in all the data. I just wonder if there isn't a better way to make the law more 'user friendly'.

Maybe the problem is the firm system - what about a way for people to engage 'freelance' lawyers, while simultaneously making 'freelance' law more attractive? What about arming people with more information about what they should look for in lawyers to make firms more competitive?

It's quixotic to look for a way to replace lawyers, but obvious market failures such as cases where one party was in the right but simply could not afford to fight must have some kind of solution.

kristenlee3• 14 years ago

One thing I always tell friends and family is that litigation is the worst way to resolve conflicts. I have filed numerous legal complaints while working for a Legal Aid organization and even the simplest cases with as little as $2k at stake require hours of drafting legal documents, arguing motions, conducting discovery, etc. The more complex cases such as those you referred to in your original post are even more complex.

My suggestion is that you approach this issue from an arbitration angle, which takes legal disputes outside of the legal system. In other words figure out how to get parties to agree to forced arbitration like in MLB when contracting with each other, the only problem with the arbitration approach is that it would only work in situations where the parties contracted with each other, but not in situations where you suing someone who has no contract relationship with you.

I believe that most "freelance" lawyers are grossly underpaid and overworked. Contrary to popular belief solo attorneys only bank between 30k-75k a year on average which is barely enough to survive. Only the top 10% of attorneys work in prestigious law firms with six figure salaries and big name clients. The majority of attorneys in America are either barely scraping by or unemployed.

blakdawg4• 14 years ago

"obvious market failures such as cases where one party was in the right"

.. chances are the other party doesn't share that perspective.

celer• 14 years ago

As a relatively normal person, I have my quirks. I read HN, I love politics, and I enjoy trying to understand the law. The fact that an average contract is impossible to comprehend is actively offensive. Most legal phrases in contracts are stock phrases. A "Google translate from law to human" would be a wonderful thing. Stick a contract in there, have all the standard parts summarized, and flag anything odd. I would adore this. This isn't about fighting battles, this is about making battles never happen in the first place. As a founder, you could run your recieved contract offers through this, just to make sure you aren't being doomed. If it can take in .doc, .docx, .odt, and .pdf files and return their translated equivalents, so much the better.

blakdawg4• 14 years ago

This is approximately equivalent to writing a program that would read poetry or literature and explain what's going on, including allusions, metaphors, snarky inside references, etc.

Or, framed differently - if law is code, it's linked against a complicated set of libraries that isn't standard worldwide, or even across a single nation. And the libraries are frequently updated - so unless you've got a statically linked executable (which may or may not be permissible) it's entirely possible that library functions will do things at runtime that hadn't even been imagined when the code was written.

Also, when the code is executed, the system's got a built-in "red team" trying to substitute other libraries that produce opposite results, and from time to time fuzzers appear that generate gibberish which may also be linked with your code.

In that context, your task is to solve the halting problem.

The battles that you are trying to avoid occur because someone wants them to occur.

The problem isn't that law is complicated, the problem is that people are assholes.

blakdawg4• 14 years ago

The "average user" shouldn't be trying to do law any more than they should be trying to do their own plumbing or wiring or surgery.

Should "average lawyers" just hack around for awhile in Visual Basic and then complain that a fully featured CRM/CMS/client portal/website hasn't popped up on their screen and installed itself on some free server somewhere? Or if those average lawyers managed to get something that would build/compile/run, would it make sense for them to complain that "computers are too hard" or "developers are too expensive" when the sad little program they produced crashed, with horrible results?

No, that would be crazy.

Lawyers should let developers and programmers work on technical things. And developers and programmers should let lawyers work on legal things.

Legal fees are "extreme" if you're looking at the most expensive big name firms - but that's like walking past a Ferrari dealer and deciding you can't afford to buy a car.

There are tons of ordinary attorneys who charge relatively reasonable fees - but many people think that, just like everything on the Internet should be (almost) free because it's all just bits, that everything lawyers do should be (almost) free because it's all just words on paper.

If you really want to be in the "legal space", the effort and resources involved starts with three years of law school and passing a bar exam.

There are attorneys who don't use a traditional hourly billing approach - in particular, and relevant to your concerns mentioned above, some attorneys for small business charge a set monthly or yearly fee for reasonably limited access to the attorney for advice and basic document drafting, etc. If an attorney could get, say, 20 companies to sign up for $1000/month, the attorney would gross $240K, giving them, say, $140K for overhead and $100K for compensation, which isn't great or awful. The companies would be able to use, on average, 8 hours/month of the attorney's time, which is enough to get some good ongoing advice and handle little issues.

If those companies wanted to pay $500/month for legal services, the attorney could probably fire his/her staff, not rent a fancy office, and work out of their home and the clients' conference rooms instead. Of course, then the companies don't get to whine about how they have to leave a voicemail when they call the attorney, and they don't get to go sit in a fancy conference room in a tall building and feel important while talking to their attorney.

Some people are doing that. (Not me, by the way.) I think it makes sense. Perhaps you could write software that would help those attorneys manage their practices, or build a site that would help attorneys and clients find each other. (there are already a lot of those, and there's a new one that pops up every couple of weeks, so I'm pretty cynical about that .. but the online dating market, which isn't so dissimilar, is pretty mature, but people like plentyoffish or okcupid manage to survive and grow despite the match.com juggernaut, so it's obviously possible.)

true_religion2• 14 years ago

People unclog their own toilets, and fit their own pipes.

They solder their own wires, and jump start their own cars.

They represent themselves in small claims court fine, and read their own legal papers before deciding whether or not to sign.

----

You don't have to go all the way and become a professional, sometimes it enough to dabble and do simple things well within anyone's reach.

I think there's a lot of simplicity to the law and the logic behind it isn't too hard to follow. However, fear holds people back from even trying to learn about case law and the court systems, and so too many fights are lost out of fear (e.g. "I can't afford a lawyer, but he can, so I give up").

blakdawg4• 14 years ago

All of your examples concern people solving their own problems, not solving other people's problems, or providing infrastructure/tools for solving other people's problems.

People who "read their own legal papers" should be commended for their diligence - but unless they've spent hundreds or thousands of hours studying the specific field in which they're signing papers, chances are there's a ton of meaning in those papers they don't understand or even recognize. Sometimes what's not present is as important as what is present - and sometimes the person who drafted the papers has included terms and conditions that sound innocuous but are incredibly important, or are completely unenforceable but sound scary.

The example you pose probably isn't "fear", it's economics - e.g., "I don't want to give up having the other things in my life I'd have to sacrifice to have money for an attorney . . . and this dispute isn't really that important to me, so I'll just let the other guy win."

I think it's a good thing that lots of minor disputes aren't litigated fully.

Ask HN: What can a startup do to help fix law for the average person?

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