[HN Gopher] Templating for Lawyers ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-03-13 23:00 UTC)