[HN Gopher] Templating for Lawyers
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Templating for Lawyers
Author : feross
Score : 77 points
Date : 2021-03-13 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (writing.kemitchell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writing.kemitchell.com)
| kderbyma wrote:
| latex is also great for this.It is fully Turing complete and I
| have used it extensively for building programmatic templates.
| choeger wrote:
| With the proximity of legal text and computer code, I always
| wondered how big a market lawyers are for pretty standard
| programming language tools and services. At the same time I am
| not so sure whether we should bring said tools and services to
| lawyers because they increase productivity so immensely...
| FrobeniusTwist wrote:
| I'm a lawyer, and a former (and still occasional) programmer.
| In my experience, tools developed for (or at any rate, targeted
| at) lawyers seem to always be bloated, slow, and of negligible
| utility as far as I can tell. For "legal development" purposes
| (i.e., writing a letter, contract, memo, brief, etc.), nothing
| I've experienced surpasses plain old Word Perfect (still in use
| in some offices I deal with). Word's automated numbering system
| can burn in eternal damnation.
|
| What might be useful would be better change tracking and
| management. The problem here is Word's dominance as a means of
| exchanging drafts. When working on an agreement, I and opposing
| counsel usually exchange Word drafts along with PDF redlines,
| which works well enough. Some attorneys like to use the "Track
| Changes" feature of word, but after a few turns you end up with
| a complete mess. Still, the sophistication and power of a git
| or mercurial would probably be wasted in the sort of contexts
| in which lawyers typically work (a series of form-based
| documents which are individually tailored in essentially one-
| off transactions).
|
| I'll ignore your quip about productivity, except to note that
| you might feel differently if you were the one paying the fees.
| btown wrote:
| https://draftable.com/ https://api.draftable.com/examples is
| a secret weapon I've used frequently as a non-lawyer,
| including to silver-platter documents for counsel and to
| review things sent by external parties: you can give it two
| versions of a contract, and it automatically derives a
| redline, meaning that as long as you have sane file naming
| schemes, you essentially have `git diff` for contracts
| without ever needing the overhead of managing a repository.
| It's remarkably robust and has self-hosted options.
|
| Thinking more broadly about tools for lawyers, I feel like
| too many attempts have fallen into the trap of "we need to
| disrupt everything and remove all rote work." From the
| lawyers I've talked to, the common thread is that they just
| want better visibility and a second pair of eyes; they'll be
| responsible for their work product at the end of the day and
| will need to type changes manually, but if something could
| help them find the "gotcha" buried on page 93 with slightly
| greater speed and reliability (or, to wit, find all typos
| from Word's automatic numbering), without requiring a full
| change in toolkit, it could meaningfully improve quality of
| life for counsel and clients alike.
| mchusma wrote:
| I'll piggyback on your final comment to state that the
| biggest problem in the legal space is cost (effectively a
| proxy for productivity). Almost all litigation against
| individuals and small businesses is an exercise is borderline
| blackmail (e.g. this will cost you $100k to defend and win so
| might as well pay $10k).
|
| It's a hard problem to actually fix, and mostly a byproduct
| of the attorneys monopoly on the legal profession and various
| mandates to make it require human intervention.
|
| Where we need to get to is letting technology and true
| startups (with limited liability) provide legal services.
|
| I will give a shout-out to fairclaims.com which I recommend
| so much more over traditional arbitration/mediation firms.
| One example of the type of thing we need.
| grosswait wrote:
| I can't figure out how to reply at the top level, but if this
| sort of thing interest you, take a look at Docassemble
| ianeliot wrote:
| I can speak to this a bit. My mom is a lawyer and we've talked
| before about the need for better templating systems. The
| problem is that the market for solo practitioners and small
| firms is just not that large or lucrative, and AIUI the market
| for large law firms is already pretty mature, or at least
| there's a high barrier to entry.
|
| But there's definitely a need among solo practitioners and
| small firms, and that need goes beyond templating to include
| better ways of organizing documents, automating workflows,
| ensuring security, and so forth. There are companies like
| Practice Panther which are trying to do this, but the problem
| I've seen with them is they encourage vendor lock-in and make
| it hard to do anything not officially supported by the
| platform.
| howtowin wrote:
| I don't know if you have started working on a potential
| solution (I am assuming not based off your verbiage), but I'd
| love to hear more.
|
| I find tremendous purpose and joy in enabling more productive
| and efficient work by developing digital tools &
| applications, especially for intelligent individuals such as
| your mother and other lawyers.
|
| If interested in sharing more, whether you want to have
| nothing to do with a potential venture or not, I have my
| public email on my profile. Cheers!
| kemitchell wrote:
| I've written code a lot longer than I've written legal text.
| But the longer I've written both, the less "proximate" they've
| seemed. Drawing parallels pleases the mind, but it's more
| trouble than helpful, most of the time.
|
| If you want to make legal texts even worse to read and write,
| throw in a heavy dose of CS-esque structuralism.
| mnahkies wrote:
| I had the pleasure of building software requirements from
| legislation once and discovered that everything left room for
| interpretation, made what seemed on the face of it a
| relatively well understood thing difficult to build.
| hctaw wrote:
| Someone can come out with it and then someone will wrap a
| dashboard around it and advertise it as "look - you don't even
| have to write code!"
|
| The biggest enemy of programming languages as general purpose
| tools for business is the idea that code == hard, and coder ==
| expensive specialized labor.
|
| If we reach a point where programming is taught as a basic
| skill like arithmetic or writing then maybe we can apply
| standard PL tools to basic business tasks.
| btown wrote:
| In the same way that Markdown compiles to HTML which is then
| interpreted by web browsers into pixels on a screen, I find it
| fascinating to consider the logical next step: the runtime
| environment in which "legal code" runs.
|
| A contract is really a function of (world state) -> (booleans for
| parties in breach), and lawyers excel at traversing the function
| space of possible contracts based on simulations of possible
| world states, making them optimizers over those function spaces.
| Their "speculative execution" and ability to cull parts of that
| search space are based on having efficient caches of case law; we
| literally train lawyers to be optimal caches by having them take
| bar examinations, because even with databases at these
| professionals' fingertips, the latency with which they can
| simulate contract space given novel information (in trial, in
| live conversations with clients) is a core competency of the
| profession.
|
| I wonder if some of the tooling and philosophies being developed
| in the machine learning world can be applied to great effect in
| this context...
| willio58 wrote:
| Do it with Ethereum. Have the U.S. government create the smart
| contracts. What's stopping this now?
| arrenv wrote:
| We have been working on this to a degree with our new platform,
| along with other layers of the agreement process. We are mostly
| focusing on contracts for digital agencies (and their clients and
| suppliers) to begin with, with templates based on services being
| delivered, deliverable signoffs, variation handling, and
| recurring agreement elements.
| anticristi wrote:
| I recently had to sign an agreement where I had to fill my name 3
| times within the agreement. It's only then that I realized that
| good lawyers know variables: "This agreement is signed between
| ... henceforth called Employee and ... henceforth called
| Employer."
| kemitchell wrote:
| I tend to start my contacts like "Vendor and Customer agree:
| ..." and then add "Vendor" and "Customer" tags to the signature
| pages at the back.
|
| There's really no reason to be repeating nicknames, legal
| entity names, jurisdictions of incorporation, addresses, and
| the like all over a contract.
| catillac wrote:
| I'm not a coder but a designer, but I also have some experience
| in this space. This is also one of those areas where the HN
| crowd will think, "I'm so much smarter they should just do X
| isn't it obvious?" What happens is that clauses are often
| litigated over and over and the successful evolution of the
| clauses that survive court battles and arbitration are then
| used wholesale in future contracts because the law is so
| settled. So it's hard to change clauses, even to replace some
| small things with seemingly equal things (names vs variables in
| this case) because that opens up cans of worms because the
| clause is no longer identical to the litigated one. So the
| efficiency gained by only needing to write your name once is
| lost in the danger of additional litigation.
|
| One analogy would be to not roll your own crypto. You may think
| you got it right, but better to just go with the battle tested
| solution.
|
| This is also one of the many reasons people incorporate in
| Delaware primarily. The law is settled and doesn't change,
| people can rely on it, so they use the clauses that were
| litigated and have settled meanings for decades.
| ct520 wrote:
| Yep - My thoughts exactly when I seen the verbiage in my court
| docs
| jll29 wrote:
| Yes, they even define terms in their contracts' preambles.
|
| But be very careful about capitalization (it's "Employee" if
| you refer to the aforementioned employee, not "employee"), a
| wrong lowercase initial letter, and you may lose a lot.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Templating has a very long history in law: law firms were
| strongholds of WordPerfect against MS Word due to WP's non-
| WYSIWYG, macro/batch-friendly nature, and insurance companies
| used and still use SGML (SCRIPT/VS, DCF, GML on z/OS) for
| printing customized contracts and account statements. Early full-
| text databases for cases and annotations etc. also evolved in
| law. SGML in particular allows full markdown and custom
| notational conventions for referencing legal code/precedents
| without resorting to ad-hoc template "engines"; it was even
| designed by a lawyer.
| faitswulff wrote:
| See also: "Brexit deal mentions Netscape browser and Mozilla
| Mail"
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55475433
| evolve2k wrote:
| In a case of hidden issues in plain sight; your first markdown
| example, speaks of what the # means but ignore the leading #
| being used to signifiy a header in markdown. Make sense to me as
| a coder, but I expect non-coders will be left confused as the #
| obviously _does_ important things and yet there's an extra one
| there that's unexplained (that does header markup).
|
| Consider removing the header all together for the sake of
| simplified grokking.
| anticristi wrote:
| I'm a coder and I still struggle to "see through layers".
| Imagine seeing the following in Ansible:
| shell: > cat {{ item }} | grep ansible echo
| $USER with_items: - hello.txt -
| hello2.txt - hello3.txt
|
| You essentially look at 4 layers (YAML, Ansible, Jinja, Shell)
| and need to "run them in your brain" in the correct order.
| kemitchell wrote:
| My first paragraph mentions Markdown. My first link leads to
| https://type.commonform.org/.
|
| Markdown first. Then Mustache on top of Markdown.
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| Yeah, I've recommended https://docassemble.org/ to a lot of
| friends in the lawyer space. They use it a lot to generate some
| automate template software.
| howtowin wrote:
| By any chance, have any of your friends shared any notable
| shortfalls of - or annoyances with - Docassemble?
| WrtCdEvrydy wrote:
| I have had one small thing with it, if you're using the
| realtime preview for fancy things (one friend used it for a
| self-managed invitation card thing for weddings), the preview
| does not use the fancy fonts that are loaded into your
| template.
|
| It's weird because the rest of the ecosystem is very good for
| almost every usecase.
| froh42 wrote:
| Heh, my father was a Lawyer.
|
| He kept using Word (the MS-DOS Version!) for a very very long
| time, because he had most of the everyday stuff he needed as
| predefined "Textbausteine" (text modules? text blocks?) - he
| would just press ESC-this-key,that-key and a complete divorce
| application for the court would pop up. Many paragraphs were
| double, so he only had to delete the male/female version.
|
| He was bragging the "work" he did for a divorce was around 10
| minutes, the rest of the time he was chatting with the client.
| (He also had several boxes of Kleenex around for crying clients -
| a big part of that work is emotional).
|
| He also had a lot of text modules for all the other bread-and-
| butter stuff that turns up every day.
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(page generated 2021-03-13 23:00 UTC)