[gearhart]

If you can't understand a contract you're signing, you aren't really signing it.

It's a very protective industry - you go through a lot of very expensive and time-consuming training and selection to get to be a certified lawyer, everyone in the industry has a heavily vested interest in making sure that there's a lot of valuable work that only certified lawyers can do.

No wonder, then, that they're resistant to automation - if you can bill $300 an hour for braindead work you can hand off to interns and just get checked by a lawyer before it goes out, why would they want to kill that cash cow?

The trouble is that quite apart from the rent-seeking cartel behaviour, it skews our entire legal system to much better serve those who can afford to pay for lawyers.

Perhaps the government ought to be supporting legal automation services.

[rayiner]

Contracts drafted by non-lawyers are as binding as any other contracts, and can be enforced in court either by individuals, or by a $25/hour lawyer from Craigslist. If a company hires a $300/hour lawyer (let's face it, these days more like $500+) to draft a contract, or to appear for it in court to enforce that contract, it's not because they have no other choice.

[dsfyu404ed]

>If you can't understand a contract you're signing, you aren't really signing it.

The problem isn't that people don't understand things. The problem is that they think they understand them only to find out that a ton of key words they thought they understood are actually pointers to specific legal concepts (which themselves may have pointers and so on) within the niche area of law the contract covers and they are blindsided by this to their detriment when there is a disagreement over whether the terms are satisfied.

This is particularly insidious (because of the preexisting power imbalance) when the legal matter is not contracts but state and local civil code and ordinance. People think they're complying with the law but they're really not and it gives the government power of arbitrary enforcement (which leads to abuse and corruption).

[someguydave]

1. Lawyers are licensed by the state to work in the interest of the public

2. They (along with lawyers like judges and legislators) create a guild with its own language which has the side-effect of empowering knowing lawyers over a reasonably literate layman

3. The public is now required to "ask a lawyer before doing anything" for "their safety"

[CPLX]

Is it “insidious” when only software developers fully understand edge cases and complicated dependencies? Or is that just how software works? Isn’t software by definition just a collection of many relatively simple rules and procedures?

Sometimes complicated systems are complicated. It’s true that lawyers can have a knack for overthinking things sometimes but fundamentally these concepts are difficult and people’s rights and responsibilities and obligations and agreements overlap in complicated ways that often just don’t lend themselves to anything but sophisticated analysis.

[hannasanarion]

Who says lawyers are resistant to automation? E-discovery is a booming market. Y-combinator just funded a startup called Klarity that reads and interprets contracts for you.

[barrow-rider]

Seriously. I used to run data centers on both coasts and we had easily a half a dozen eDiscovery firms and several regular law firms with big data center presences -- presumably because they're using some of those tools.

Hourly billing rates of $300/hr make law a juicy target for technical disruption.

[expertentipp]

> if you can bill $300 an hour for braindead work you can hand off to interns and just get checked by a lawyer before it goes out, why would they want to kill that cash cow?

Various intern and entry-level positions in legal are notoriously low paid and involve many sacrifices. One starts to earn money allowing to sustain oneself maybe in mid-30s? If one survives until that point (i.e. family members in the profession already, or some other family predispositions).

[SpelingBeeChamp]

Interestingly, there are many legal settings in the United States where non-lawyers have roles roughly identical to those of attorneys.

See here: https://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/20072450-Rolesfor...

[howard941]

Resistance varies greatly depending on jurisdiction. Your terminology suggests you're not in the USA (pardon me if I'm mistaken). Over here in the states the established firms have a vested interest in automating or offshoring (or both) as much as possible, for obvious reasons.

The US government should be supporting legal aid for civil matters. From watching the boob tube civil matter legal aid is a thing in old Blighty. Pity we didn't adopt that along with the common law. But w/r/t govt funding in the US it can barely finance public defenders (to which there is a right, if I read Gideon correctly) and anyway, it's every man for himself. That's the American way.

[DanBC]

> From watching the boob tube civil matter legal aid is a thing in old Blighty.

No, absolutely not. You get legal aid if you're being prosecuted for a crime. You get legal aid if the state is trying to remove your children (but only at the point where they've served the notice and gone to court). You might get legal aid in family court (for divorce or child contact arrangements) if your spouse was abusive. You might get legal aid in court of protection. But for most civil law there is no legal aid available: you use the small claims track or you pay for lawyers.

[behringer]

Many regional governments offer the paperwork you need right on their government website. In my state, you can easily sue for damages, child support, custody and many other common matters without any lawyer.

[pnw_hazor]

Suing is the easy part.

A friend did a non-lawyer "quick and easy" divorce -- mistakes were made. 10 years later he almost lost a house because his ex declared personal bankruptcy. It took some fancy lawyering for me to save it for him.

I did it gratis, but the same effort would have cost him ~$20K or more if he had to hire an attorney. Well, really, in his case, it would have been too late since he didn't even think it was an issue until he mentioned to me in passing on the last day before defaulting on the complaint.

[behringer]

A good lawyer definitely earns her pay.

[pydry]

I worked with some lawyers on some legal (finance based) automation based work and they weren't overtly resistant to automation at all, but it was fairly self evident that they were used to over-complicating everything - e.g. creating legal work to counter entirely hypothetical risks or explaining really simple things in a overly complicated way.

They would habitually take 5 minutes to explain something in a hard to understand way that could be explained in 30 seconds clearly with zero loss of information.

It reminded me of the software engineers I've worked with who manufactured job security with dizzying levels of technical debt.

[pnw_hazor]

Lawyers may lose their license if their explanations to clients are not complete.

Generally, I find non-lawyers are often lazy, sloppy, or indefinite when speaking or writing. When I was a software engineer I didn't notice it, now I see or hear sloppy/lazy language everywhere and it bugs the crap out of me.

[gamblor956]

When you're dealing with anything involving more than a few zeroes, those edge cases are the point of hiring lawyers, because those edge cases are usually what lawsuits turn on.

If you don't believe edge cases matter, just ask Cleveland how it feels about losing the (original) Browns...