

Ask HN: What can a startup do to help fix law for the average person? - DividesByZero

The law is very difficult for the average user. Legal fees are extreme to the point of pricing many potential users out, and the incentives for legal firms often aren't aligned with the best outcomes for clients and the interests of justice.<p>Many of these issues affect startups and entrepreneurs - patent issues, financial law, contract law - founders find themselves unable to fight battles that they ostensibly should be able to win according to the law, but cannot afford to fund.<p>These pain points seem like potential opportunities for  a startup to turn into an opportunity.What could actually be accomplished by a startup in the legal space, and what kind of effort and resources would it take?
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blakdawg
The "average user" shouldn't be trying to do law any more than they should be
trying to do their own plumbing or wiring or surgery.

Should "average lawyers" just hack around for awhile in Visual Basic and then
complain that a fully featured CRM/CMS/client portal/website hasn't popped up
on their screen and installed itself on some free server somewhere? Or if
those average lawyers managed to get something that would build/compile/run,
would it make sense for them to complain that "computers are too hard" or
"developers are too expensive" when the sad little program they produced
crashed, with horrible results?

No, that would be crazy.

Lawyers should let developers and programmers work on technical things. And
developers and programmers should let lawyers work on legal things.

Legal fees are "extreme" if you're looking at the most expensive big name
firms - but that's like walking past a Ferrari dealer and deciding you can't
afford to buy a car.

There are tons of ordinary attorneys who charge relatively reasonable fees -
but many people think that, just like everything on the Internet should be
(almost) free because it's all just bits, that everything lawyers do should be
(almost) free because it's all just words on paper.

If you really want to be in the "legal space", the effort and resources
involved starts with three years of law school and passing a bar exam.

There are attorneys who don't use a traditional hourly billing approach - in
particular, and relevant to your concerns mentioned above, some attorneys for
small business charge a set monthly or yearly fee for reasonably limited
access to the attorney for advice and basic document drafting, etc. If an
attorney could get, say, 20 companies to sign up for $1000/month, the attorney
would gross $240K, giving them, say, $140K for overhead and $100K for
compensation, which isn't great or awful. The companies would be able to use,
on average, 8 hours/month of the attorney's time, which is enough to get some
good ongoing advice and handle little issues.

If those companies wanted to pay $500/month for legal services, the attorney
could probably fire his/her staff, not rent a fancy office, and work out of
their home and the clients' conference rooms instead. Of course, then the
companies don't get to whine about how they have to leave a voicemail when
they call the attorney, and they don't get to go sit in a fancy conference
room in a tall building and feel important while talking to their attorney.

Some people are doing that. (Not me, by the way.) I think it makes sense.
Perhaps you could write software that would help those attorneys manage their
practices, or build a site that would help attorneys and clients find each
other. (there are already a lot of those, and there's a new one that pops up
every couple of weeks, so I'm pretty cynical about that .. but the online
dating market, which isn't so dissimilar, is pretty mature, but people like
plentyoffish or okcupid manage to survive and grow despite the match.com
juggernaut, so it's obviously possible.)

~~~
true_religion
People unclog their own toilets, and fit their own pipes.

They solder their own wires, and jump start their own cars.

They represent themselves in small claims court fine, and read their own legal
papers before deciding whether or not to sign.

\----

You don't have to go all the way and become a professional, sometimes it
enough to dabble and do simple things well within anyone's reach.

I think there's a lot of simplicity to the law and the logic behind it isn't
too hard to follow. However, fear holds people back from even trying to learn
about case law and the court systems, and so too many fights are lost out of
fear (e.g. "I can't afford a lawyer, but he can, so I give up").

~~~
blakdawg
All of your examples concern people solving their own problems, not solving
other people's problems, or providing infrastructure/tools for solving other
people's problems.

People who "read their own legal papers" should be commended for their
diligence - but unless they've spent hundreds or thousands of hours studying
the specific field in which they're signing papers, chances are there's a ton
of meaning in those papers they don't understand or even recognize. Sometimes
what's _not_ present is as important as what _is_ present - and sometimes the
person who drafted the papers has included terms and conditions that sound
innocuous but are incredibly important, or are completely unenforceable but
sound scary.

The example you pose probably isn't "fear", it's economics - e.g., "I don't
want to give up having the other things in my life I'd have to sacrifice to
have money for an attorney . . . and this dispute isn't really that important
to me, so I'll just let the other guy win."

I think it's a good thing that lots of minor disputes aren't litigated fully.

------
kristenlee
As a Harvard Law School graduate I want to say that the OP is really
underestimating the skill set of lawyers, the law is a very difficult field
and the suggestion that it is a cartel is a little overblown. Every legal
issue is different, no two divorces are the same, no two lawsuits are the
same, no two patent disputes are the same. This is why you don't really see a
Dreamweaver/Weebly type app for web application development, no two web
applications are the same and each one has different needs and challenges that
require the skills of a computer engineer to work out. Same way for the law.
The underlying attitude in Silicon Valley that "every problem can be solved
with a web app" just does not hold true in the real world, especially for hard
problems such as America's legal system.

~~~
DividesByZero
I'm not suggesting something like an app to solve legal problem just by
plugging in all the data. I just wonder if there isn't a better way to make
the law more 'user friendly'.

Maybe the problem is the firm system - what about a way for people to engage
'freelance' lawyers, while simultaneously making 'freelance' law more
attractive? What about arming people with more information about what they
should look for in lawyers to make firms more competitive?

It's quixotic to look for a way to replace lawyers, but obvious market
failures such as cases where one party was in the right but simply could not
afford to fight must have some kind of solution.

~~~
kristenlee
One thing I always tell friends and family is that litigation is the worst way
to resolve conflicts. I have filed numerous legal complaints while working for
a Legal Aid organization and even the simplest cases with as little as $2k at
stake require hours of drafting legal documents, arguing motions, conducting
discovery, etc. The more complex cases such as those you referred to in your
original post are even more complex.

My suggestion is that you approach this issue from an arbitration angle, which
takes legal disputes outside of the legal system. In other words figure out
how to get parties to agree to forced arbitration like in MLB when contracting
with each other, the only problem with the arbitration approach is that it
would only work in situations where the parties contracted with each other,
but not in situations where you suing someone who has no contract relationship
with you.

I believe that most "freelance" lawyers are grossly underpaid and overworked.
Contrary to popular belief solo attorneys only bank between 30k-75k a year on
average which is barely enough to survive. Only the top 10% of attorneys work
in prestigious law firms with six figure salaries and big name clients. The
majority of attorneys in America are either barely scraping by or unemployed.

~~~
DividesByZero
That's really interesting, especially about the lawyer underemployment problem
- do you have a link to some data backing that up?

Is it possible to create some sort of legal instrument where a case is
simplified by first creating a contract between the disputing parties? It
sounds daft but if savings on both sides are significant due to the
simplification it would be in their interests to agree - especially if terms
were standard issue of some sort.

Thanks for the food for thought.

~~~
kristenlee
Empirical Study On Legal Salaries

[http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2008/07/how...](http://www.elsblog.org/the_empirical_legal_studi/2008/07/how-
the-cravath.html)

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celer
As a relatively normal person, I have my quirks. I read HN, I love politics,
and I enjoy trying to understand the law. The fact that an average contract is
impossible to comprehend is actively offensive. Most legal phrases in
contracts are stock phrases. A "Google translate from law to human" would be a
wonderful thing. Stick a contract in there, have all the standard parts
summarized, and flag anything odd. I would adore this. This isn't about
fighting battles, this is about making battles never happen in the first
place. As a founder, you could run your recieved contract offers through this,
just to make sure you aren't being doomed. If it can take in .doc, .docx,
.odt, and .pdf files and return their translated equivalents, so much the
better.

~~~
blakdawg
This is approximately equivalent to writing a program that would read poetry
or literature and explain what's going on, including allusions, metaphors,
snarky inside references, etc.

Or, framed differently - if law is code, it's linked against a complicated set
of libraries that isn't standard worldwide, or even across a single nation.
And the libraries are frequently updated - so unless you've got a statically
linked executable (which may or may not be permissible) it's entirely possible
that library functions will do things at runtime that hadn't even been
imagined when the code was written.

Also, when the code is executed, the system's got a built-in "red team" trying
to substitute other libraries that produce opposite results, and from time to
time fuzzers appear that generate gibberish which may also be linked with your
code.

In that context, your task is to solve the halting problem.

The battles that you are trying to avoid occur because someone wants them to
occur.

The problem isn't that law is complicated, the problem is that people are
assholes.

------
duncan_bayne
Find a way to end the lawyer cartel:
<http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=51>

Good luck with that :-/

~~~
DividesByZero
The formation of a cartel indicates market failure. The source of this is
usually due to some property of the good or service.

In that link, the property appears to be the licensing of legal practitioners
as a sign of competence to represent clients, but it does not address the
structure of incentives around providing the service of practicing law. What
properties could a disruptive business exploit to improve the situation?

