mountainair

The other issue is the absolutely bonkers number of attorney-hours racked up in reading all of those documents once they've been systematized.

That's where I see potential in this market. Ediscovery is a pain-point for law firm clients - especially large corporate clients who are constantly involved in complex litigation. Document review has to happen in order to effectively litigate (gotta find the smoking gun!) but when a bill comes through with hundreds or thousands of attorney-hours devoted to reading your opponent's old emails, ouch. The client hasn't even seen a work product yet.

It's a problem I face almost every day.

The role of a regulatory attorney is to explain to the regulatory agency why they should do something (think: PPM in power plant emissions, high-frequency trading controls, restrictions on flight paths and requirements for airport construction, you name it, it's regulated). But the attorney doing the explaining is trained in law, not in whatever the technical subject matter is. So the attorney relies on his client's experts in the field for information. But if an attorney doesn't have a basic understanding of the technical aspects, he won't know what questions to ask to get the right details, and he won't be able to make meaningful strategy decisions. In turn, most regulatory agencies are required by law to make decisions based only on the documents and information provided to them in the hearing/filing process. And all those documents are prepared by attorneys. If the attorneys miss a detail, the regulatory agency misses it too.

I would envision this sort of tool as providing background that will allow the attorney to ask the right questions, rather than a complete education on the technical subject matter.

They've been virtually entirely replaced by digital systems. I graduated from law school a few years ago and we were not taught to use a book-based system to do research. Some much older attorneys use books, but they hardly ever do research anyway, since they have young guns to do it.

Please, oh please, make this a reality: "By classifying regulations using the same system that science librarians use to organize papers in agriculture, we can determine which scientific papers may form the rationale for particular regulations, and link the regulations to the papers that explain the underlying science."

I cannot begin to describe how incredibly useful this would be. Regulators rely on the information provided by regulatory attorneys to craft their policies, so it's critical that the attorneys have a deep understanding of the issues. And paid legal research tools just don't/can't/wont provide that sort of information. In this vein, it would be wonderful to include social sciences - topics like economics and finance. Perhaps SSRN is a good option.

Lawyers don't necessarily need to code to improve their own lives - but they MUST learn to code to improve their relationships with their clients.

If there is any aspect of programming involved in any contract or lawsuit (which is becoming the norm), the lawyer absolutely must have at least a vague grasp of the tech to be effective. Too many lawyers and judges are just utterly perplexed, and it leads to bad law that makes things more difficult for everyone down the road.

Even the most basic understanding of programming would be so so helpful, if only because it makes the world of computers slightly less alien to your average legal practitioner.

Sorry, my question is: How does one use symptoms-based perfectly? My understanding is that a perfect use case happens only a few days each month. So on those few days, you might have very low "failure" rates, but on the other 25 days per month, is a "perfect use" possible?

What is the perfect use case for symptoms-based?

You're not alone!

In fact, it's so tricky to sort through the Show/Ask HN archives that I don't often use HN when I want to browse new projects, I use producthunt.com

As others have said, it would be a good idea to speak to a lawyer. I know that the taxes and fees associated with becoming an LLC or corporation can seem steep, but if you plan to hire employees, it is an absolutely vital step. You said your business is a sole proprietorship, and that opens you, personally, up to all of the liability that your business incurs. In other words, if something goes awry and your business is sued, your home is on the line. And your risk for being sued increases as you take on employees/volunteers/interns/etc.

Look for a business law clinic at a local law school - they might charge a small fee but there's a good chance they will work for free. Your issues likely have a simple solution, and there's no reason to pay a lot in legal fees for that.

Good luck!

I work in an industry in which it's extremely important to justify business expenses to regulators months or years after the transaction takes place. The ability to build a complete, real-time narrative around expenses, instead of jotting a few notes about a receipt two weeks later would be so helpful.

It seems that your focus is exclusively on small businesses. Is that the case?

You're right. Klout as a standalone service was unviable from the beginning. Especially in light of the up-and-coming services like Quora, Thoughtly, Medium, etc., that actually attempt to measure and curate according to the quality of the person talking, Klout is extremely lucky to be making their exit now.

How do you envision your users will use their Thoughtly signatures? Can the signature feature be used anywhere?

If you are located in a major city and are looking for low-cost legal services, seek out intellectual property or entrepreneurship clinics at local law schools. In Chicago: http://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/elc/ In SF: http://www.usfca.edu/law/ipjustice/

I do a lot of very informal writing online, mostly in Subreddits related to my field, but also in comments on news articles at places like Wired and Ars. I find that you learn almost as much from the (non-insane) comments as you do from the articles themselves. This is probably the same reason I use/read Reddit. I do have some more academic writing published on Academia.edu and SSRN, but I don't engage in discussion there. Best of luck!