[ruairidhwm]

I've seen quite a few of these and whilst I love the idea, they usually have a ton of problems in them.

As tptacek pointed out - there is no chance that this document would survive first contact with a sophisticated party and any qualified lawyer would likely rip this to shreds.

Firstly there is no regard to the potential jurisdiction that the user chooses. If I were to put in England then that would mean there are different contractual implications to choosing Scotland. Ditto for states in the USA. A layperson won't know this, and a lawyer would need to review the provisions.

There are also a ton of generalised terms in this document where things like 'intellectual property rights' aren't defined. These aren't generic terms and in the event of a dispute, language really matters. There is a reason why contracts are much longer when professionally written.

This isn't to attack the idea, I'm hugely in favour of open access to legal documentation, but people need to realise that most legal work is bespoke - even if law firms do it on a 'churn' basis. This is a great effort to further open law but it's dangerous for people to rely on this.

Source: I'm a software engineer and a qualified lawyer

[Tehchops]

>Source: I'm a software engineer and a qualified lawyer

I imagine there is no shortage of demand for your cross-section of skills?

Do you utilize them both, or did you pivot from one to the other?

[ruairidhwm]

I did a legal tech startup a while back, and now I'm looking for another opportunity :)

[hiccuphippo]

I wonder if there could be a library of legal terms so I can build my contract with it like I can build an image using a canvas library.

initial_boilerplate() add_jurisdiction("England") add_involved_parties(foo, bar) etc

[mthomasb]

We (Bonsai, YC W16) built something like this specifically for freelancers. You enter the parameters of your project and we'll generate a contract using a variety of pre-set clauses. https://www.hellobonsai.com/freelance-contracts

[ruairidhwm]

I've been wanting to build a legal IDE for ages, it makes no sense that lawyers are stuck using Microsoft Word with lots of bolt-on plugins rather than a VSCode / Sublime equivalent.

[avinium]

Said tools exist, though they're not particularly successful. Word is just too easy to use - even if the replacement is 5% better (which is unlikely), that's not enough to prompt a shift.

[koolba]

The issue is that the replacement isn’t 5% better (it is!), it’s the network effect. The counter pretty likely will ask for a redlined Word doc so you’re back to exporting it from your fancy scm-diffed Markdown file.

[pnw_hazor]

There are tools. Enterprises use them.

Also, some small-scale practice areas like family law have form generator tools.

[ruairidhwm]

Yeah - I was involved in helping a large company purchase one of these tools and it was a nightmare. The software was poorly made, and of course every corporation does things differently.

Part of the problem is that legal teams don't understand how this software works, and the companies that create it use salespeople who will promise all kinds of things, so you end up in the situation where an in-house team has been told it will cut down their hours by X%, the software isn't designed for whatever task it has been sold for, and it becomes a hack job to make it do so.

The areas like family law (or particularly executries) are great for document generators. Similarly in corporate where there is a lot more routine work. These have already come into law firms in a big way but it's not particularly innovative (though still welcome).

[pnw_hazor]

There are enterprise contract management systems that do this kind of stuff.