

Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant - jwb119
https://ironclad.ai

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former_ls
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.

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jwb119
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.

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just_a_giraffe
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.

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gogwilt
(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!

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thenipper
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.

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jwb119
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 :)

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donw
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.

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jwb119
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!

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

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jwb119
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.

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chinathrow
And an imprint or at least a contact address. Why would anyone share sensitive
files without even that... can't imagine.

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Animats
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...](http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/latest_legal_victory_has_legalzoom_poised_for_growth)

~~~
jwb119
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
> 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.

~~~
jwb119
Hmm, we were actually going for the same point you're making by using that
analogy. The thinking is that lawyers handle legal advice (and practice law),
while legal assistants handle legal administrative work (and don't give legal
advice or practice law). Maybe there's a better way to say that though. I'll
think about it, thanks for bringing that up!

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a3camero
"Legal advice" vs. "legal information" vs. "project management"/"clerical
work"/"administrative work".

Legal assistants are often carrying out the instructions of lawyers. I've
never seen one that operated independent of a lawyer.

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JoblessWonder
> 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.

~~~
jwb119
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?

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pseudonym01
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?

~~~
jwb119
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 :)

~~~
pseudonym01
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

~~~
jwb119
Awesome, thanks for checking it out and for the feedback! This kind of stuff
is great.

I think the process server / courier is an interesting analogy. We're
definitely not trying to replace lawyers here, but we do want to separate out
the admin work and make the whole process more efficient.

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nkw
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?

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jwb119
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.

~~~
nkw
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.

~~~
jwb119
Awesome, yep we are very aware of this. Will be updating the copy and making
it more clear going forward. Thanks for the encouragement!

~~~
nkw
I went back to look at this and noticed from your comment history you _are_ a
lawyer, so disregard my comment about getting one on board. :) I was going to
show your app/site to someone but noticed it is now locked down and just has
'private beta'. Is there an open site with info or a demo for someone who
wants to look around?

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gamblor956
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
Yes, because everyone should have to get permission from a bureaucrat in order
to earn a living.

~~~
nkw
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.

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glifchits
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.

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jwb119
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!

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

