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A family member is a lawyer in the Worker's Comp, SS, and Family Law space. THE software for lawyers in this space is called A1 Law. It solves a lot of real pro
by tmsam 10y ago
A family member is a lawyer in the Worker's Comp, SS, and Family Law space. THE software for lawyers in this space is called A1 Law. It solves a lot of real problems lawyers in that space have (form letter generation, calendar integration, case management)... but it's so slow to use new technologies. They advertise PalmOS integration. My family member has to have their own server in a closet running the server version of this so his team can use it! He has no idea how to manage a server, it's absurd that he has to.
Everyone I know in law is dissatisfied with every part of their tech stack. If someone could come up with an integrated SaaS solution, and be SUPER careful about compliance... they would be printing money.
- DavidPlumpton 10y agoMake the slightest mistake and you are getting sued!
- vornth 10y agoAnd getting sued by lawyers, at that.
- ChristianGeek 10y agoExactly this. I wouldn't code legal software for any amount of money.
- starik36 10y agoLast time I had a consultation with my lawyer, she fired up WordPerfect. There is a blast from the past.
- agf 10y agoI still get virus / malware emails from the AOL account of an IP lawyer I worked with in 2011 / 2012. Also a blast from the past every time.
- rhizome 10y agohttp://wordperfect.com http://wordperfect.com My impression is that the legal industry is most of the reason why WP is still being used.
- daveguy 10y agoWord Perfect is the vi of word processors. I still program in vi.
- oblio 10y agoYou most likely program in vim or another vi successor. Possibly with a ton of configuration settings and plugins that weren't around in vi. Big difference.
- daveguy 10y agoFair enough. It is vim -- I still refer to it as vi because I'm that old. And yes, I do take advantage of undo and syntax highlighting. I'm sure quite a few of the modalities I use over the years have been added (oh! Tabs, very important). But the point is, relatively old control interfaces can be very effective even after 30 years.
- cpach 10y ago”Initial release: 1979; 37 years ago” Quite amazing that it’s still around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#History
- mnrode 10y agoO.o Last time I had a consultation with my lawyer, he fired up One Note on his tablet.
- makmanalp 10y agoGeorge R. R. Martin uses WordStar: https://news.slashdot.org/story/14/05/14/2019225/game-of-thrones-author-george-r-r-martin-writes-with-wordstar-on-dos https://news.slashdot.org/story/14/05/14/2019225/game-of-thr...
- fs111 10y agoMany people here use emacs or vim...
- pdimitar 10y agoThat's subjective, so you should've kept your subjective opinion away from HN.
- rpedela 10y agoI investigated doing a SaaS product in the legal space. One of the things I heard multiple times from lawyers is that they are more likely to buy a product if they can bill their clients directly. What you are talking about would not fall into that category. That doesn't mean you couldn't build a successful business, but I think it is important to understand that the market has different rules.
- exceptione 10y ago(...) if they can bill their clients directly. Can you explain what you mean? Letter generation etc is still usefull, I don't see what billing has to do with it. They can still charge what they want to.
- dpc59 10y agoI think he means pricing schemes are more simple when you go with a flat "200$/hour rate". Obviously it's shit for the client since they have no idea how many hours will be spent on the case, but that's not the lawyer's problem.
- rpedela 10y agoSure. The purpose of a SaaS product would be to improve efficiency and save time. Given lawyers typically charge by the hour, they would lose money unless they could bill their clients directly for the use of the more efficient software to make up for the lost revenue due to saved time. However billing clients for legal software is not the norm.
- derekdahmer 10y agoI've heard the same thing from multiple people attempting to build for the legal space. Lawyers won't pay for software to save time because that has a negative ROI for them. OTOH they may pay for tools that helps them provide more services, bill more time, find more clients, or decrease the chance of mistakes.
- naasking 10y ago
- amenghra 10y agoA lawyer friend of mine told me his firm doesn't use software to check all the "hereafter referred to" are bound to their template and vice-versa. They instead have to print the document and go through it with a highlighter. The firm charges their clients on an hourly basis, so they don't really have an incentive to be more efficient.
- faitswulff 10y agoI feel like charging on an hourly basis is a common pattern in many industries that opens the doors to competition from startups with different pricing structures...as long as the startup can do everything in a manner compliant with the existing industry. Logojoy, for instance, is an example of a service that supplants human labor with a single "good-enough" deliverable at a low price, and does so in a fraction of the amount of time. I imagine this would be much more difficult in legal settings, but LegalZoom seems to be alive and kicking, so it must be possible.
- ksdale 10y agoI completely agree. To your second paragraph, I would add that it's hard for customers (and lawyers) to figure out what is "good-enough" in the legal setting. I'm a lawyer and there's a lot of stuff you can find on the internet that I personally think is good enough (I would use it in my personal affairs because the risk of the missing edge cases being an actual problem is slim) but I wouldn't be comfortable recommending it as a solution to a client because those missing edge cases are a real malpractice risk. In the case of a logo, good enough is whatever the client thinks is good enough. In the case of a lot of legal solutions, good enough is often a murky risk/reward calculation based on legal concepts the client may not understand completely. I still think there's enormous room for improvement, both in helping clients understand the concepts and the risks they're taking, and also in providing better automated solutions.
- petra 10y agoIs there a place for a law consulting company that just consults you on how to save money or how to find what's "good enoudg" ?
- throw9322 10y agoI have a family member who is a lawyer and who has a similar type of software setup. The biggest obstacle I notice in the legal industry is that many simply don't care. They actively dismiss software as being unimportant even though they rely on it every day. It's a very bizarre case of the legal industry hating the very industry that could help them. Note: perhaps my experiences aren't representative of the industry as a whole.
- nihonde 10y agoThis is exactly correct. As a lawyer and a software developer, I long ago gave up on the idea of selling software to solve the problems of lawyers and/or law firms. Lawyers tend to be terrible customers of technology, if for no other reason than that they have established completely backward incentives that reward inefficiencies and information deficits. The only "legal tech" that can succeed (in my opinion) is the kind that eliminates the need for lawyers, but then you're up against a different problem: people who think lawyers are magical wizards who can invoke spells to keep lawsuits and regulators at bay. It's really hard to convince many people that they don't need a lawyer, even though lawyers and law firms are almost never accountable for the advice they give.
- verbify 10y agoSo you don't agree that 'the person who represents themself has an idiot for a client'?
- mvc 10y agoProbably smart to bring one to court with you but maybe not required for drawing up a standard will where the few assets you own should just go to your next of kin
- DINKDINK 10y agoLawyers write human readable code that's compiled and run by a judge or interfacing APIs (institutions such as financial ones) Your advice is akin to saying "hey you inexperienced coder, write some production ready code but don't test it and when the only time it needs to run, give it a try. Hope you don't screw it up! When there's another coder in the room who can claim 'oh no he meant to set my financial variable 100X not 10x' and can convince the compiler to agree with them"
- Joof 10y agoIf I didnt have to risk becoming a lawyer, I'd love to combine some legal education with my programming and machine learning skills.
- rbcgerard 10y agoI always thought there should be a one year masters of law program - no path to practicing, but gives you the frameworks and knowledge to be a good consumer of law
- seehafer 10y agoThere is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Studies_in_Law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Studies_in_Law
- tompetry 10y agoWhat about MyCase? https://www.mycase.com/ https://www.mycase.com/ Not familiar with the space, but seems like what you are describing.
- ransom1538 10y agoI really hope the tech talent talent doesn't help lawyers sue people more effiently. What a waste. If you do, I truly hope lawyers are your customers.
- digler999 10y agowhats wrong with suing people ? if someone's actions damaged you, would you want recompense ?
- stult 10y agoActually, I'm a lawyer and a product owner at a big accounting firm, so I'm pretty well positioned to discuss this topic. I have half a dozen solid startup ideas that I'm tempted to take and start running with right now. Documentation management alone is in desperate need of innovation. I build toy apps in my spare time that cut thousands of dollars of charge hours young associates waste on bullshit tasks, just within my one small practice group. The whole legal software industry is a joke. But here's the real problem for anyone looking to innovate in that space: the customers. Lawyers are as a rule anti-technology, slow to adapt new techniques, and set in their ways. Worse yet, they just bill their clients for their shitty software like Lexis or WestLaw, so they aren't even personally motivated to reduce costs.
- sitkack 10y ago> cut thousands of dollars of charge hours young associates waste on bullshit tasks Doesn't this take money away from your firm? It is only when firms are competing on cost, time or client recognized quality that they will institute better workflows via software.
- kpil 10y agoHa, never thought about it but I guess it's problematic to compete on cost in a scenario where the clients often need the best advice they can get...
- chuckus 10y agoDepends, there are billable hours e.g. time spent with customers and non-billable hours e.g. administrative tasks not specific to any customer such as payroll, transfer of knowledge between work colleagues. So by targeting reduction of non-billable hours, you would have a compelling reason to sell to firms who bill by time.
- stult 10y agoThat's pretty much true in general. Our fees are dictated more by the market than our actual costs. So if we were billing fewer hours, we'd just raise the hourly billing rate for our associates. From our perspective in the national standards group, we would actually want our associates to just spend more time on value added activities. Instead of wasting time organizing PDFs of exhibits and monkeying around in spreadsheets, we want to them evaluating the relevant legal and technical tax issues. So it's not precisely cost control that is the primary concern, but quality assurance.
- morgante 10y agoI would strongly encourage people to think twice about trying to sell software to lawyers. It's a Sisyphean task. They are, as a rule, extremely anti-technology and conservative. At a previous startup, we had built software which was saving customers many hours a week—yet it was still an uphill battle to get paying approval. If even after all the warnings in this thread you really want to build legal software, focus on disrupting lawyers instead of selling to them. In general, law and media are two of the worst fields for technology.
- tommynicholas 10y agoSeconded
- jupiter90000 10y agoI worked in a tech department of a rather large law services organization. There was a desire to maintain certain inefficiencies so that more hours could be billed to clients. If it could be done in 25% of the time, that's 75% less they could bill clients for 'attorney time spent.' See how well pitching 'do it faster and make less' goes over.
- mysterypie 10y agoCan't they still bill whatever they want? If 10 hours of proofreading, form filling, photocopying, and filing would be billed for $1500 (10 hours x $150 an hour), couldn't they still charge $1500 if the software took 80 milliseconds to do the same job? Oh, the clients expect an itemized bill? Simple, the above charges would be "10 legal intern equivalent hours @ $150/hour". If a client questions it, the lawyer can explain that they are now using a very expensive piece of software instead of interns and attorneys for certain tasks, but felt it was an ethical obligation to quote the cost in a human understandable way. Turn the arbitrary pricing into a positive! And of course your software should be able to quote all its tasks in these legal intern equivalent hours. This also leaves the lawyers hands clean since they can say that the software came up with hourly figure, not them.
- 10y ago
- OliverJones 10y agoLots of commenters here have mentioned parts of law practice that involve lawsuits, complex negotiations, and so forth. Workers Comp, Social Security, Family Law, and elder law in general aren't as glamorous. Clients for those services don't have such deep pockets as the other corners of the law do. It's likely that a good SaaS-based system with embedded knowledge of jurisdictional rules (in the US, federal and state rules) could be successful. But the sales cycle for a new product? Getting early adopters? Prepare for some pain.
- hunckler 10y agoThere's a new startup called Doxly that might be a good SaaS solution: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthunckler/2016/12/05/doxly-could-end-late-night-document-scrambles-for-transactional-attorneys-and-paralegals/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthunckler/2016/12/05/doxly-co...
- SStephano 10y agoThat's interesting! A1 looks archaic. An interesting startup in this space is https://www.upcounsel.com https://www.upcounsel.com. They provide document management, calendaring and the such but operate as a marketplace platform. Would absolutely agree that the barriers to entry (compliance etc.) seem to be a big opportunity to offer solutions in the law space. As an interesting note: It looks like UpCounsel serves primarily as a marketplace due to upending the current law firm system which other comments have mentioned as a big barrier to technology adoption in the space. Interesting space nonetheless!