

Judicata: The Path of the Law - igurari
http://blakemasters.tumblr.com/post/37718729412/judicata-raises-2m

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ramanujan
Legal startups are an important new trend, with Legalzoom, Rocketlawyer,
Judicata, and quite a few others that have recently been announced:

<http://venturebeat.com/2012/03/20/legal-startups>

<http://startupstats.com/legal-startup-2012-03>

One important question is "why now", which is partially addressed in the post:

    
    
      The latter is clearly ideal. So why hasn’t it happened yet? 
      Why hasn’t software eaten the law? Our thesis is that it’s 
      actually quite hard. Lots of people have tried. Some are 
      still trying. But most are hacking at the branches. 
    
      Incremental change is not without value. But software can’t 
      actually improve legal decision making unless we aim 
      higher. Harder, but more promising, is to strike at the 
      root of the problem. The law is information. The future of 
      legal technology involves organizing and understanding that 
      information. ... The fusion of legal domain expertise and 
      engineering talent is key
    

So, this rationale is a good one for Judicata (their team is clearly very
talented), but it's worth thinking about what's going in terms of
prerequisites from a broader perspective.

Sometimes there are ideas that were just before their time; 1999's webvan.com
didn't work, but today delivery.walmart.com or Amazon Fresh is available.
Webvan failed because it was nontrivial to set up a nationwide infrastructure
to deliver low-margin perishable goods. Amazon and Walmart built that
incrementally; Amazon starting with higher-margin non-perishable books and
Walmart with physical stores. And even Amazon Fresh is not yet nationwide.

Sometimes there are clear technological reasons why newer iterations took off.
Six Degrees was one of the first social networks circa ~1999, but digital
cameras weren't that popular and it was hard to get photos of faces online.
Just a few years later, Friendster and then Facebook didn't have that problem.

And sometimes there are ideas that just require experience to build. A lot of
the early cloud services were premature because people just didn't have
experience operating large websites at scale. It's a lot easier to factor AWS
out of experience operating Amazon, or App Engine out of experience operating
Google, than to do it from scratch in 1998.

Infrastructure might be one of the most compelling arguments for "why now".
Today, unlike ten years ago, every single lawyer is using computers and mobile
devices regularly. Massive numbers of legal documents and patents have been
digitally indexed in Google Scholar. And many judges and law professors have
been blogging for sometime.

But perhaps the evolution of the legal market is the most important. Lots and
lots of young lawyers are out of work or underemployed while paying off huge
student loans. There is a newfound cynicism about law school and that means
the young have started to think about doing things differently. Even those
from elite schools who have no problem getting jobs can feel this in the
zeitgeist. And, critically, these discontented young would also be the first
adopters of any new technology.

So perhaps that's the answer. Why now for the boom in legal startups? Not
because of a single new technology per se, but because (a) one can assume
computer/internet/mobile infrastructure to be utterly ubiquitous [even in law
offices] and (b) the market is ready because young lawyers are restless.

~~~
igurari
I think your broader market points are generally correct. And I'd add that
amongst younger lawyers the expectation of technology is that it should be
well designed, pleasant and smart. Unfortunately, most legal technologies
don't stand up to these criteria.

That said, Blake's broader point about the difficulty of the problem still
stands, and we think the difficulty - not market trends - is why no one has
done this yet. There is much technology and infrastructure that makes what we
are doing significantly easier today than it was even 5 years ago. But
underlying it all is still a lot of difficult technology that takes years to
build.

------
dudurocha
Wow! Congrats Blake. You made a nice working in the transcripts of Thiel's
class, and now he is one of your investors. Congratulations!

