Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

by jwb119 • 11 years ago

105 39 11 years ago

jwb11915• 11 years ago

Hey HN! we created a better way to handle the most common paperwork needed by startups. Just sync a Dropbox folder with us and we’ll take care of all the legal paperwork for NDAs, Contractor agreements and LOIs and organize it in that folder automatically for you. We’re really looking for feedback on the flow and so any feedback is much appreciated.

The best way to jump right in is to go through signup and do a Letter of Intent (LOI) - you can just sign one with yourself to try it (use the same email, but use a slightly different name so you can tell the parties apart).

Thanks for taking a look!

detaro• 11 years ago

IMHO, your page is badly missing legal information like a privacy policy

jwb11915• 11 years ago

That's correct, we're working on getting that up. Thanks for pointing that out. Right now we're mainly just looking for feedback on whether this is something that people might find useful.

a3camero3• 11 years ago

Who made the form agreements that you're using? You might be able to find a lawyer willing to supply you with these documents and also attach their name to them. That way your clients could have some confidence in the documents.

There are thousands of different NDA and contractor forms floating out there on the Internet but they don't come with explanations of the qualifications/experience of the drafter.

jwb11915• 11 years ago

There are thousands of different NDA and contractor forms floating out there on the Internet but they don't come with explanations of the qualifications/experience of the drafter.

This is really interesting and something we're looking at. Looks like you're an attorney as well.. let me know if you have an interest in chatting about this!

pseudonym012• 11 years ago

My initial thought was seems like a useful product, my second thought was legal documents seem like the kind of thing that almost always require a manual overview to make sure everything is in order.

So my question would be something along the line of how do you address this seemingly unavoidable necessity?

jwb11915• 11 years ago

That's where Dropbox is really cool actually. They have a bunch of great collaboration tools. The way we handle it is we do all the admin stuff - collecting info, filling in the docs, putting in tags for e-signatures - then we drop it in a dropbox folder so that humans can edit the document. When the humans are done editing, just tell Ironclad to pick it back up and we'll go from there :)

pseudonym012• 11 years ago

Again sounds interesting and (not necessarily in a negative way) kinda puts me in the mind of a process server/courier could be useful I'll keep it in mind

Animats• 11 years ago

At last, the startup web site which gives no information.

"The best way to jump right in is to go through signup". Wrong answer.

Do you have a legal opinion that you are not engaged in the unauthorized practice of law? LegalZoom had a lot of trouble with that.[1] Even after some wins in court, they operate only in 41 US states, and have lawyers and paralegals on staff.

Badly drafted contracts can cause big trouble later. You need to go to a lot of effort to convince customers you know what you're doing.

[1] http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/latest_legal_vict...

jwb11915• 11 years ago

Hey John, thanks for your comments. Really appreciate you taking a look and I hear your points. Your question is probably rhetorical, but we're certainly not trying to give legal advice here (and we've been careful to build this in a way that it's clearly an admin tool and not a replacement for legal advice). As far as the "jump right in goes" - just trying to fit in to the spirit of a Show HN and have people play around with something we've built.

yid• 11 years ago

we've been careful to build this in a way that it's clearly an admin tool and not a replacement for legal advice

While the parent comment was a bit harsh, literally the first point on your landing page is "A modern legal assistant", which really does sound like you're managing parts of the legal process that a lawyer normally would.

thenipper• 11 years ago

Are you planning on supporting more then just Dropbox?

I do nights/weekend IT support/systems design and setup for some small law practices and most of them are on Box. It's what has been recommended by the bar here in Massachusetts. Plus I've found it to fit a law office's workflow pretty well.

Before I could really evaluate this for a law office there would need to be a solid privacy policy in place as well as at least a blog post about data security.

I like that you're trying to move quick, but lawyers tend to move pretty slowly in adopting new technology. The concept is cool but as it stands now it'd be a hard sell.

jwb11915• 11 years ago

Yeah Box is great, and I agree a lot of enterprises use it. It'd be cool to work with them as well (though obviously we don't do it now).

Good points on the privacy policy and data security - it's a priority but not reflected on the site right now. We'll do that.

Thanks for taking a look :)

donw• 11 years ago

You also want to provide some information about the team, and some contact information.

I love the idea, but right now, your landing page looks very suspect. No contact information, no US phone number or office address, nothing about the team or corporate details...

These are all key factors that indicate to potential customers that you are a legitimate business.

Privacy policy, terms of use, data security policies, and so on are also going to be very important to your customers. If you have questions in that arena, feel free to ping me -- email is in the profile.

nchudleigh• 11 years ago

Looks really useful, we are looking at some working with contractors and this could really help us out.

former_ls• 11 years ago

I like the potential of this, but not sure how filling out forms could be automated just yet. In a former life, I worked as a legal secretary and there always seemed to be subtle requirements I would have to fulfill like knowing how many copies something needed, who got which copy, and being able to fill out docket sheets based upon lawyer workload and client timing. I eventually developed a suite of tools that helped me in my day to day tasks, but some I couldn't imagine how to automate in a meaningful way.

That said, the best thing I ever developed was my own filing system which ran in parallel with official office filing. I had a folder per case and client which I would keep raw documents and an electronic signed version of our pleadings. I would also have a digital copy of the other side's pleadings run through OCR. This process involved day-to-day work to keep it up to date, BUT it allowed me to answer questions like "Which pleading was it that they filed which said x a month ago?" in seconds instead of minutes/hours without robust search.

jwb11915• 11 years ago

This is really interesting, thanks for creating an account and commenting! I think that you're right - litigation related forms do have more complex requirements. That's one of the reasons we started with corporate documents, there seems to be a more common set of building blocks - smaller document sets, more routine requirements (like making sure everything gets signed and stored somewhere), etc. I'd be very interested to talk to you if you're up for a quick chat at some point about the litigation process though.

nkw4• 11 years ago

I like the 'keeping your legal documents organized'. What is up with the pre-loaded "industry standard" templates? Are you guys a law firm? Do you carry malpractice insurance in case these "industry standard" templates are awful and screw up someone's startup?

jwb11915• 11 years ago

We're definitely not a law firm and we're not giving legal advice. Will put some more info on this up soon - we want to make this better.

nkw4• 11 years ago

Cool. I think there is some real potential in this area. Just be careful and get a lawyer on board to guide you through the sticky issues.

JoblessWonder• 11 years ago

Pre-loaded with industry standard templates.

What industry? The legal industry? Transportation? Software? I agree with the feedback others are giving. The product interests me but there isn't nearly enough information for me to sign up, let alone trust you with any part of a legal document.

jwb11915• 11 years ago

Cool, appreciate this feedback. The point of doing a Show HN was to make the product better and more clear, and this is helpful for getting that info. We'll work on it.

Is there anything else that interests you about the product that you'd want to know more about?

glifchits• 11 years ago

Seeing this comment thread, I couldn't resist the urge to shamelessly plug our own product Beagle (beagle.ai), which is a contract analysis tool. Like Ironclad, we're tackling the legal space, but where it looks like Ironclad helps you manage your contracts, Beagle helps you understand them.

Beagle uses NLP to provide you with a broad understanding of which party in the agreement is liable or responsible for what. In addition, it provides real-time negotiation tools. Reach out to us if you'd like a demo, we're currently bringing on new customers in private beta.

gamblor956• 11 years ago

This appears to be the unauthorized practice of law, unless there's something missing from your description.

Collecting information and using it to fill out templates forms a significant portion of the practice of transactional law (i.e., contracts). Most specifically, as to the legal judgement of what form(s), statements, or clauses are appropriate, what the terms should be, etc.

I'll give you guys a week to rethink your service and get a lawyer on board, but next Wednesday if your service hasn't changed I'm contacting the CA State Bar.

jes• 11 years ago

Yes, because everyone should have to get permission from a bureaucrat in order to earn a living.

nkw4• 11 years ago

You're right. Excuse me while I go order a set scalpels and a surgical mask off eBay. Where can I pickup those big cylinders of anesthesia?

edit - actually the comment you were responding to was pretty asinine re: reporting them to the CA bar, but I think there is a reasonable basis for requiring licensing of certain professions.

davemel37• 11 years ago

"unless there's something missing from your description."

I love how your assumption jumps to them missing something vs. you missing something.

My understanding was this is simply dynamically plugging in your personal information into a template - which you are providing (as opposed to actually picking and choosing language and terms).

You might have legal tunnel vision looking for the extreme possible interpretations, versus what the average user interprets. This landing page is not a legal document, it is a sales page, and a pretty clear one at that...

jwb11915• 11 years ago

Thanks for the comment and generosity, this is a work in progress and I’m sorry it set off an alarm bell for you. We posted this to get some usability feedback on what we were working on, it’s not a fully built out description. As background, we’re aware of UPL and we are careful to not provide any form of legal advice. Ironclad is designed to be an administrative tool just like google, email or dropbox would be.

That said, we will take down the landing page and update the copy (which we’ve intended to do all along once we got some feedback). If you’re willing to take some time to talk to another HN user, I’d very much like to address your concerns, hear your feedback, and use any ideas you have for moving forward. Would you have some time on Monday? I’m at jwb119@gmail.com if you want to email me so we can set something up.

just_a_giraffe• 11 years ago

Doing intelligent templatized form entry seems really convenient. Having signed up with a fake name/email[1], I was expecting to get an idea of what exactly this system would do for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have "preview" functionality for anything, and forces the steps to accomplish something to be _very_ linearized.

I can very much imagine wanting to "jump ahead" in the process when hiring a contractor. Yes, <Person X> hasn't yet informed Ironclad of their existence, but that doesn't stop me as an employer from knowing terms of the contract like compensation. Unfortunately, the workflow here seems to be:

* Get info * Make initial Contractor Agreement * Allow both parties to make incremental edits via dropbox (garnered this from other comments in this thread, so it could be wrong) * When both parties agree, move on to the contracts part and repeat the "offline negotiation".

Every contract I've ever worked has been negotiated in person, and either there has been a fully filled contract (save for my details and signature) or no contract at all. I prefer the former case by far, as the latter ends up involving a face-to-face negotiation without the fine print, and inevitably holds up work when the contract has some unsavory fine print.

Having a system provide both "checkboxes" for doing things in a normal-ish way AND long-term tracking of documents would make my life a lot easier.

[1] No privacy policy means no PII data from me. You've seen plenty of this already in the comments, though.

gogwilt• 11 years ago

(I'm also working on this.)

Allowing you to enter the contract details immediately definitely sounds like it would make things much more convenient. We have been keeping track of ways to make all of our templates more usable, and this is a great idea.

Thanks for trying our our platform, and for your feedback!

jwb11915• 11 years ago

Hey everyone, thanks a ton for your comments and interest. Now that we’ve had a chance to get some feedback, we’ll be closing up the site while we make improvements and get some of the things that you suggested in to the product. Please feel free to email admin@ironclad.ai if you’d like to get in touch. We really appreciate your feedback!

Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

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