We Are All Lawyers Now – The Rise of the Legalish
artificiallawyer.com
artificiallawyer.com
The difference between a lawyer on the one hand, and a "jailhouse lawyer" (an engineer who does legalish work) on the other, are these:
The lawyer knows how to get things done to support the business. It's rare for a real in-house lawyer to tell the business, "we can't do that." More often, it's "here's how we do that."
The lawyer knows how to write a form contract (sales, lease, nondisclosure, etc) so other lawyers will read it and say "ok, that's fair" and sign it.
The lawyer knows how to read an incoming form contract to see if it's fair.
The lawyer has real relationships with her counterparts at customer and vendor companies. When a vendor tries to change terms, she calls her counterpart and asks, "what's this about? My business has problems with this. How can we get to yes?"
The lawyer knows that if a dispute gets to a judge, the remedy will be money. With very few exceptions there's no way for a judge to repair a business deal that's gone sideways. So the lawyer says, "anything but court."
At some level, the law is like computer code. But the computer code has been around for many centuries and it has been patched over and over and over again as needed to solve real-world problems: in the US and English system that's called "case law.". There's an adage that "hard cases make bad case law." Lawyers know the ins and outs of this stuff.
In my experience as an entrepreneur, when I've played lawyer I've generally overdone things to my detriment.
The US is definitely litigation-happy. That makes things tough.
Experts are gatekeepers, and the whole thrust of the culture over the last few decades has been towards the removal of gatekeepers, towards the "democratization" of everything. Who needs journalism when you have blogs and social media? Who needs doctors when you have WebMD and Goop? Who needs lawyers when you have LegalZoom and YouTube?
The problem, of course, being that experts are called experts because they know stuff that you don't, and as we drive all the experts out of the public square the vacuum left behind as their knowledge departs is being filled by dangerous nonsense. "Democratization" is not proving to be a very good advertisement for democracy.
The less fashionable expertise becomes, the more I find I appreciate it.
If it is omnipresent enough and too expensive to defer everyone had to practice some law then.
People will not even pay a $1500 for an independent review of a $1million home purchase. Most just blindly follow their real estate agent's advice even though such agents are usually hopelessly conflicted because of their own financial interest in getting the deal done.
If you think there's an honest chance that a $1500 independent review could turn up something that would make you turn down the deal and try to find another, do you then expect to have another $1500 review done? What expectation should you, a non-expert in doing this kind of calculation, have about the total cost of having independent reviews done?
Also, $1500/$1million sounds tiny, but nobody who thinks they can't afford a $1500 review buys a $1million house in cash; they get a mortgage and expect to pay $4.5k/month, and people in general don't save (or have the ability to save) as much as I do/would. So it's $1500/$4500 in the immediate future of having to make your first payment, on top of closing costs, etc., for benefit that is already unclear to a non-expert.
And by definition we're talking about a non-expert, because that's why they would have the need to hire a lawyer to do an independent review.
Anyway, it's not that I necessarily think lawyers are that expensive across the board, but the existence of that perception shouldn't be very confusing. A non-expert doesn't have the tools to accurately put a value on expert services.
Depending on the discovered issues, if any, your offer may be voidable or in a worse case you will have to forgo your earnest money. Still better than losing the whole house years later because of something like an incorrectly handled DIY divorce.
So, in that case, it would be to the best interest of the seller to reduce their asking price and/or fix the major problems that were found, so that they no longer have to carry this legal burden going forward.
Yes, this happened to me and my wife (she's the lawyer in the family), and this resulted in us getting over $12,000 cut off the purchase price of our house, in addition to getting a number of major problems fixed before the deal actually went through.
IANAL myself, and I can't make any claims that anyone else will necessarily benefit in the same way, but that detailed inspection of the house-to-be-bought can be worth 10x the cost you pay for it -- or more.
As I understand it, the title company reviews and insures everything related to the title. And the Purchase and Sale agreement is a standard form contract. What would a buyer need a lawyer to review?
A title company's promise to insure real property titles/deeds comes with many (sometimes pages) of exceptions or disclaimers that depend on the state of the title history. Stuff they don't understand (confused records, muddled divorce/death histories, old easements, etc.) they will disclaim from the coverage.
Title companies provide a several page title commitment that describes the state of the world as they see it and given that state-of-the-world they craft and issue a policy. They don't guarantee against things not included in the title commitment they disclaim them away.
In most cases, especially in developed urban areas, the default works. But if there are edge conditions, the title policy often doesn't fix them because the policy disclaims around them.
But if you read and understand the title commitment and trace the title history yourself (or hire lawyer to do so), you can challenge the title company to remove unwanted disclaimers or add additional protections before you close. Also, you can identify potential chain of title issues and have the seller fix them before closing.
edit: s/misstated/overstated/
It definitely didn't feel like a bargain, but so much of what you are paying for is the knowledge of what needs to be filled, when, maintaining the case docket, serving discovery, filing motions, etc. and all of these can be incredibly puzzling for someone not familiar with proceedings of the court.
You don't HAVE to use Wilson and $onsini to look at incoming NDAs, for example.
The whole point of writing fair form contracts is to remove legal burden when deals get done, without compromising the outcome or the rights of either party.
It's true that VCs have close relationships with certain white shoe law firms, so legal costs can be high when closing rounds of financing. Grumble about it, for sure. Consider it a tax on the money you raise. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that same law firm is "your lawyers," and you can't get help from other lawyers.
My point is that if your guild is entrusted with monopoly power by the government, the guild's behavior must be held to a higher standard (work must be in the public's interest, not in the guild member's individual interest). Unfortunately this point seems to be lost in modern culture.
Non-lawyers who represent themselves in court don't stumble because of a sinister conspiracy by lawyers to trip them up. They stumble because law is a really complicated subject, and no matter how smart you are it's impossible to replace years of full-time learning with a little reading on the side.
The saying "a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client" is hundreds of years old.
Put another way: nobody individually profits when the law is made simple and clear.
If you want to have rule of law relying on simple laws just doesn't cut it most of the time.
Now, legalese can and should be reduced, modern lawyers are working on that. But laws will always be used to enforce/define complex systems or relationships. This often requires complex rules.
I do see how the application of simple law is complex. But that complexity could be seen as a trade-off. I'm willing to have a reasonable amount of injustice in exchange for simplifying the application of the law.
The people experiencing such injustice are not willing, and violently so.
Having been through a 2 year legal battle myself, I can tell you that the complexity is there for a reason, and that reason is lawyers arguing a client's case, the court reconsidering their previous opinion, and hopefully a more fair outcome going forward. The world is far more complex than we can imagine, otherwise we'd be able to write perfect, simple laws.
Let me give you a challenge: Say my wife and I are getting a divorce, and we are splitting up community property. I have options and RSUs (any equity asset on a vesting schedule really) that I was awarded before we were married, some that were awarded after, some awarded before that vested after our date of separation. These all have different vesting schedules, strike prices, and hypothetical future value (stock might tank, might leave before it all vests, etc). What is a simple law to determine what dollar value I owe my ex for her interest in this community property?
For instance in your divorce question: why not excercise everything at the date of divorce and split the proceeds 50/50? Is that outrageous? Or simple?
What if one of the parties doesn't want to sell the stock, or it doesn't make sense because the stocks are currently underwater (but may not be at some future date)? What if many of the assets in question are Restricted Stock Units, with no agreed upon value since they cannot be priced until they are released?
"Just sell it all and split it 50/50! DUH!" is not something that works in the real world, where the law is meant to operate.
You think hanging them up from yardarms would deter them?
You want to ensure proper behavior; you have to take away the tools that let them aggregate power in the first place; and prevent it from re-occurring.
There is no "higher" standard. There is only one standard; functional, competent, accountable, just.
If you don't have a legal system that can accomplish those. Then you need to scrap your legal system. Not "hold them to a higher standard", which often is just an escape clause for preferential treatment ("Chevron deference").
It is not an accident that the GINI coefficient, is so drastically out of whack in the US.
The mortgage system, was meant to break the original land grants (which had to be honored under British-American common law).
The corporation both a shield for the rich; and a sword against the middle-classes as it disenfranchises citizens from the bill of rights.
Intellectual property is just a more extreme form of corporations. The notion that idea can be owned for decades, with the cost of enforcement out-sourced to the public, and private profits insourced.
Same with the public schooling system (ready workers). Etc.
Just about every Western institution ("improvement") you'ld care to name, has an ulterior motive moving us one step further along to what amounts to perpetual slavery.
I think if you sent back a person from this era, 120+ years ago, to try and "improve" the American system, they'ld have burned him alive. Such is the level of degradation inherent in todays "modern" governance.
But there's nothing like seeing an expert walk into a situation where a bunch of amateurs are squabbling, and seeing the expert just take over the situation. Expertise is still supremely valuable, even if it's unfashionable.
I've seen this first hand, as I had a brutal two year long divorce case, and in spending time with my attorney, got to see many opportunities for technology to improve their jobs. I actually wrote some Python to calculate something called the Hug/Nelson formula to figure out community property interest in options/RSUs. I was really surprised that nothing existed to do this for me, and even played with the idea of making an app to sell to lawyers, because they are seeing more and more divorce cases with these types of assets being split. But where to start? How do you "certify" something to the degree that a lawyer will trust it? It's a huge market potential I think, but the status quo seems pretty entrenched.
This seems interesting. Do you have examples? I know I once got stuck on a clause that was not 'fair' but my advisor said it's a minor and the other side probably didn't want to involve their much more expensive lawyer (firm) to change that paragraph.
I've found the opposite. Saying "no" is almost always a safe answer, or at least an answer that won't get them fired, which seems to create a bias that direction.
I'm sure it's a bit different when the CEO asks, but most of us unfortunately have to go talk to the company lawyers without running things.
However, there's also the case where the shitstorm is so bad that they lawyers have a legal and moral obligation to tell you (and the CEO, and the Board of Directors) that what you're doing is wrong and illegal, and maybe even quit over grossly inappropriate or negligent activities.
LOL. This is so wrong, its not even funny.
Lawyers, are incompetent. If you haven't come to that realization yet; its because you haven't dealt with enough of them. It is -extremely- rare, even at the higher levels of pay, to get a lawyer, who actually knows the specifics of your case.
In a very real way, its all ad-hoc expertise. A series of one-off's you try, to get a compromise your client can accept.
> Lawyers know the ins and outs of this stuff.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Yeah right.
> In a very real way, its all ad-hoc expertise.
> A series of one-off's you try, to get a compromise your client can accept.
^^^ substantive comments. Not "ranty". Points. Made in logical order.
You may not like them. But they are there.
For example for basic levels of protection, you at least want a terms of service and privacy policy on your site.
You'd think it's just copying and pasting some boilerplate. But say you want to allow user uploads, then you also need to not get screwed if someone uploads a picture owned by some copyright troll. So then you have to figure out how to get DMCA safe harbor status so you're not responsible for user content. And that requires: registering at a copyright office, monitoring email for timely takedowns, and communicating counter notices, etc. All of this work and we haven't gotten to GDPR compliance yet!
At one point you just go fuck it, it's a side project. Just wrap it in a LLC so it can't bankrupt you even if you do get sued. But now you have to deal with company formation laws which is yet another can of worms.
Unfortunately, the Internet has made it easy to harm and fuck over people far outside your circle of friends and acquaintances, so playing around isn't a viable option anymore.
The only way to reliably fix this is to institute some form of judgment of whether or not an actor was following the spirit of the law. If they weren't they should have any advantages gained by skirting the law removed by force.
Of course this leads to a different set of problems with the potential for overreaching state actors. One way to combat this could be making the judicial branch much more independent than it usually is in most countries.
But when people speak of European colonial law v common law, they are normally talking about French v. British. The Napoleonic tradition followed in former french colonies is very different than the British common law. And there are places (Louisiana and Quebec) where these two legal traditions were forced to merge. When comparing the two we still see the catholic v protestant split, which is expected given the history. The french relationship with language, that there is a government agency to define words, also leans towards a more authoritarian view of legal interpretation. America today doesn't even have an official national language.
Because that is their goal, they want government to work badly. So they obstruct change and improvement. Any system of laws needs to be changed as loopholes are discovered to improve the law. We can’t do that in the US because billionaires own one of our two parties.
And the generic sentiment about how horrid it is to "cut taxes on the rich" ignores the fact that taxes almost exclusively impact "the rich" as about 40% of the population pays essentially zero taxes. It's very difficult to cut taxes on those who do not pay them.
Income tax is actually quite low for even a significant amount of the 60% above that no-tax line.
It also ignores the fact that a significant amount of those in that 40% actually get paid credits back at tax time that they didn't pay in. That phenomenon is so well known that January-April sees a significant spike in Xbox and big screen TV sales from that money the government injects into the economy using EIC and other refundable credits.
Ultimately I'd rather see people who are investing in building businesses that hire people to get tax cuts, as those can meaningfully impact the economy. Our current tax scheme of high corporate tax and high personal capital gains tax directly disincentivizes investment and economic growth.
Personally I would draw it at an income where someone living within their means can afford to raise a happy, healthy, well-educated family and provide all with proper dental and medical care, including responses to unforeseen and serious emergencies, without being financially destroyed, and go on to retire in relative comfort.
Beyond that, you and I have deep ideological differences that I hardly think are worth airing in an internet forum, and I'm not going to bother.
Most people would disagree with your definition as well, that's normal middle class, not rich. And most of them don't pay much in taxes either.
Well, I didn't say you said that, so we're good. I'd say I more implied that you implied it.
> Most people would disagree with your definition as well, that's normal middle class, not rich.
Yes, that does sound more like a middle class lifestyle than a "rich" one, doesn't it?
> And most of them don't pay much in taxes either.
Most of who? A hypothetical middle class that meets my (possibly flawed) criteria for richness, or an actual middle class as defined by some percentile spread about the median household income?
What rate of taxation is "much in taxes"?
That's pretty reasonable. It's also hard to cut a number that small.
When you get into paying 50k, 100k+ in taxes, then a percentage tax cut will appear much larger.
I know plenty of people who have about 2k withheld throughout the year and then get 5k-15k "refunds" at the end of the year. That's what I was referring to with the xbox and tv comment, those refunds are often spent that way.
The spirit-of-law comes into play at the enforcement level in the form of executive discretion rather that at the adjudication level.
Civil/Social policy behind a law may be brought up during adjudication to help interpret a law -- but if policy is your strongest argument you are usually in a losing case.
From experience: this is dangerous and completely wrong advice. The corporate veil can be pierced if the LLC is determined to be an "alter ego" of the individual, which isn't a difficult argument for a one-person side project.
Pro tip to people reading this, don't take generic advice about something that might have financial/legal implications...consult a lawyer/accountant.
I'm just saying I'd be surprised if there were a situation in which a lawyer would advise that registering an LLC is reasonable protection from all legal repercussions of your solo side project.
I say this from experience because I once made exactly that mistake (formed an LLC that was otherwise unnecessary specifically to protect against potential legal consequences of a side project, only to find out from a Google Alert six months later that a lawsuit had been filed against me personally).
Does this mean there was an article or something online before you were contacted about the lawsuit?
But yes, when the proper formalities and separations are maintained, there are many situations where registering and operating through an LLC will limit personal liability.
Example: company signs a contract with no personal guarantee but with a commitment to make 12 monthly payments. The LLC later lacks the funds (contract was signed in good faith). No personal liability.
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, just a law geek layman and former law student. I agree that retaining counsel is the right advice for anything important.
I use to make good money going after contractors who thought their LLCs would protect them when they vanished with client money. Veil-piercing is actually quite simple for one-man LLCs. As a practical matter, the burden is really on the one-man LLC to prove that the veil should not be pierced, since it's usually pro forma for the plaintiff to show some evidence that the proper formalities and separations were not maintained. (For example, paying for a personal expense like lunch with LLC funds, even once, is enough to shift the burden to the LLC to show that the veil should not be pierced. Not having proper receipts for gas. Attempting to claim a business deduction for part of your garage if you're not charging the LLC market-rate rent. It's a really long list of don'ts. )
Misconduct like "vanishing with client money" is a separate personal tort and/or crime (depending on the specifics) and would make it easy to pierce the veil anywhere regardless of formalities and separations.
That said, for more normal situations that aren't about misconduct, different states take different levels of strictness in analyzing the veil piercing question. YMMV.
Without consulting a lawyer, you don't know what you are chancing. I hardly call that a good bet.
Not knowing how to get a lawyer or accountant is not a good excuse for not consulting one.
If you consult a lawyer for 1 project, you do learn from the lawyer and become a bit more knowledgeable for the next project and may not need to consult a lawyer a second time if the new project is similar.
Step 1 - Find a Lawyer:
1a. Ask people you know. For example, if at a company, maybe you can ask the legal dept for a referral for your personal project. Lawyers know lawyers. Even a divorce or real-estate lawyer will know other lawyers in different specialties or reputations of firms. Ask bankers, dentists, any small business people, etc. - they use lawyers too.
1b. Use Google. Call 5 lawyers and setup a meeting to meet them.
Step 2 - Interview them:
Interview them like you interview any potential employee. What is their experience with small IT projects? Are you small potatoes to them? What are their fees? Do they have legal associates to do the grunt work for cheaper than a legal partner (partner will still review and be responsible)? What do they suggest you to do for your side project? Ask why to see if they can explain themselves well. How well do you communicate with them? Do they respond to your emails or telephone calls quickly? Do they have other partners who can cover for them when they go on holidays or are busy with other urgent cases? Can they let you do some of the work such as incorporating and registering a trade name because it is easy (to keep legal fees low)?
Step 3 - Evaluate them:
As they work, get them send you all their documents. Read the legalese and ask more questions. Do they still explain themselves well. How long do they take to do the work? Attention to detail is important. If their work sucks or you don't communicate well with them go find a new lawyer.
Lawyers and accountants industries are whole mess on its own. When you come to lawyer/accountant, he is really interested to charge you as much as he can, which creates a lot of conflicts of interests, and whatever he is saying to you can't really harm him.
One has to take calculated risks, and do research on his own to not be screwed by lawyers/accountants.
(This can't be the actual answer, can it?)
Reputation is one proxy you can use for trying to gauge competency - ask friends, family, or coworkers if they have someone they're happy with.
Ultimately, there's a few big things they need to do, and you can try to evaluate those things instead or as well:
1) Clearly explain things you need to know. This might be making you aware of paperwork you need to file, tradeoffs between choices, rationale behind why they're suggesting you do something, or what the tradeoff is so you can make your own decisions.
Some (many? most?) lawyers are willing to do a free initial consultation, so you can get a feel for this in person, if you don't have a recommendation or don't want to trust only reputation. Basically: Can they communicate effectively?
2) Keep you out of trouble. There's a limit to what a lawyer or accountant can do of course, but a pattern of surprise financial difficulties, or getting into frequent contract disputes or lawsuits are a bad sign. The IRS frequently correcting an accountant's filings would be another.
3) Stay on top of things. Is the accountant filing taxes late resulting in IRS fines? Paperwork not ready when they said it'd be? Asking for the same information several times because they keep misfiling it? Going incommunicado for months when you have questions?
It seems simpler in practice: It came up in conversation that my friend had gotten his will done. I mentioned I needed to get my will done. He liked his lawyer, and was able to explain some about what he liked about her approach and give me her name. So I scheduled a consult with her on her website after trading some initial questions over email, showed up as scheduled, and then traded more questions at her office. I didn't know all the right questions to ask - mine were mostly of the form "uhh, so what do I do?" - but she was able to volunteer explanations about state inheritance law that put her questions for me into context. And then she had recommendations for things to do and why, as well as things she'd recommend not bothering with and why (and the contexts under which that could potentially change in the future), without being pushy.
Based on my answers, she drafted a will for me, and I was able to come back and sign it a month later when I scheduled it. I think I paid half after the initial signing but before she drafted the will, and the other half after the signing? Now I can recommend her to my friends, or ask her if she has any recommendations for an accountant, or even other lawyers for specialized needs.
Could I have done more to vet her? Sure. But I did enough for my tastes. Can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good enough and all that.
And yes, that is the reason that CA charges $800 for LLC registration. Because if $800 is too big of an expense...then you're not running a business.
I went with a more futile attempt to do everything anonymously, pay hosting with bitcoins, etc. But this is basically impossible from an opsec point of view (which should restore some faith in the legal system in the sense that I never figured out a way to opt out of it).
Subpoenas[1] basically cost nothing(<$100) for your typical lawyer to issue. Everything you touch will very eagerly give up all your info when subpoenaed (e.g., your typical domain registrar will spew your name, address, payment information, ip addresses logged in from, etc).
Form it where it makes legal sense, not where you reside. You can also get a forwarding address there as well.
It also would be in your benefit to follow the laws of that area as well.
BTW: You don't have to block them completely, just don't target them specifically (e.g. accept their credit cards).
For example, you could make an app that collects arbitrary amounts of personal data. You could "promise" your users whatever you wanted, especially in the health and fitness space.
There are many ways it can.
For instance, why must you legally have a privacy policy? Because of a law in California.
What does that privacy policy entail? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You can write a privacy policy that say you are going to go out of your way to make any private information given to you as public as you can or sell it all to the king of Saudi-Arabia and if nobody reads that privacy policy then it's kind of meaningless. And very few people read the privacy policy.
People seem to think, well this is popular... so they can't be doing anything bad or someone would stop them. And with internet properties, that's simply not the case.
There's no implicit privacy or federal/global definition of what privacy rights people should have, if anything the rights are diminished the higher up the ladder you get. So people have to navigate a sea of differing definitions in massive legal documents which they aren't properly trained to do unless they already hold a law degree.
Nevertheless, the crossover between the needs of legalish and what we perceive as the legal field is remarkable.
I know, I know, it's marketing fluff so I'm supposed to give bullshit a pass, but why are we upvoting marketing fluff on HN?
I heard a CCO complaining that non-legal people should not have access to any contracts. Her claim was that they would read those contracts and think they understand them, while in fact they won't. She considered this a too great risk because only legal people could truly understand them.
She'll love this piece.
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.
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.
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.
Hourly billing rates of $300/hr make law a juicy target for technical disruption.
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.
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.
If you don't believe edge cases matter, just ask Cleveland how it feels about losing the (original) Browns...
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).
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.
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"
See here: https://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/20072450-Rolesfor...
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.
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).
Oh sure that contracts says we would have to pay 10 millions if X happens, but then what is the likelihood of X happening, and what should be done to minimize it?
Of course it sounds easy: "just tell the business guys the risk and they will assess the probability", but in practice there are thousands of different risks associated with a contract, even the simplest one, so that ends up being EXTREMELY difficult.
And then you have all the contracts were the legal department thought they understood everything and it actually ends up not being as expected at all because rules and unclear, political and change like the wind, especially when it comes with international contracts.
So the issue is more than the law texts and contracts are too complicated for us to understand despite the fact we are living by them.
You can't have a lawyer behind each decision of your life. But if you want to live a legal life, right now you need to. It's insane and not be sustainable for a democracy.
And no law journals, no need of knowledge of precedents. In fact, why even have lawyers?
I might agree that I could read the words in laws and think I understand them, but I disagree that 'the law' is that simple.
Law is like javascript, except every other word needs the same context and explanation that "this" requires.
For example, many reasonable people disagree on whether the second amendment's wording is intended to mean that _everyone_ should be able to bear arms, or whether it's intended to mean _only people in a militia_, and there also seems to be some disagreement on what "arms" means. I can see how a reasonable person could interpret it in either way. Such disagreement seems to have been something which the founders themselves shared.
tl;dr: People disagree both on what we currently interpret words in law to mean, as well as on what the _intent_ was when it was originally written.
And yet, yes, I'll argue that dev, in any language, is complicated.
Hell, there is a good part of the population that will consider assembling an ikea desk complicated. Let's not forget we are in the HN bubble here.
People are fallible. Just because something is simple and known doesn't mean that there won't be mistakes.
Statisticly people representing themself in court have very little chance to win a case.
The sheer amount of data you need to assimilate to just have an idea of what you need to do makes dealing with law a complex matter. Add this complexity to jargon, social and political dynamics and of course, experience, and you have a very complicated problem.
The law is not just an isolated set of words of paper. It's an intricate piece of a several systems.
But you don't need to go this far to prove my point. Take any recent bill, and make your grandma read it, then write a summary of it. She votes, but can she understand it ?
Case law, is the only thing that matters.
"oh you can sue your employer for breach of contract over that" and the employee A) thinks that they can a do that and B) stand a chance of winning.
Think about this: If I give you the simplest piece of advice in legal matters, I'm heavily encouraged to declare I'm not a lawyer and that you should contact one.
This is the only profession where I see this be so reliably the case. In other risk-averse professions (tax compliance, health) there is always the obvious "You should talk to a professional" but even in health it's not as heavy-handed. I've never seen a doctor say "I'm a doctor but this is not medical advice" when giving basic information.
And I understand the superficial reasons why this is done, but there's just as many reasons not to get your buddy-mechanic to fix your car without them making you sign waivers.
This matters because the people who most need legal advice are those who can't afford lawyers. Makes me very uneasy.
Also to your CCO, I would say that if we were limited to what we would understand day-to-day, there would be no more learning. This is one of the core pillars of free software after all.
Or maybe alternatively, those laws do exist for other professions, but other professions are not as risk averse about being sued over them. For example, I'm pretty sure that practicing medicine without a license is just as illegal, but I've never heard a doctor worry about saying "this is not medical advice".
Lawyers do that because enforceable lawyer-client relationships can be created based just on a conversation, and whether there is one or not turns on whether the non-lawyer thought there was one. The creation of a lawyer-client relationship, in turn, has knock-on effects. A lawyer can be sued for malpractice based on that verbal advice, can be disqualified from taking a case adverse to the “client,” etc. Also, state bars are extremely humorless about unlicensed out-of-state practice. Just the appearance of giving legal advice in a state where you aren’t licensed can get you in trouble.
And, the duties and responsibilities of a lawyer to their client are different than for doctors.
They could be made the same but that would require new/more laws.
Just offering general statements about the law, or hypotheticals, like we're doing, on this board, isn't enough.
Is this really done to protect the public (as opposed to because state bars want to try to protect lawyers as the only people qualified to talk about the law)? I have my doubts, but I'd like to stay employed.
[1] Look at this example I found in 20 seconds of googling to see how talking about legal issues in a public forum can lead to a headache for lawyers: https://www.nvbar.org/wp-content/uploads/opinion_32.pdf. It looks like sanity ultimately prevailed (you don't form an attorney-client relationship by calling into a radio station), but I'm sure whichever lawyer did this spent years dealing with potentially having their career ended while this moved through the California State Bar's system.
A large part of what people say on the Internet is confident and wrong. For any hot topic, people will pretend to be experts after reading a news article or two. It's not uncommon to have debates where nobody in the conversation has any relevant experience.
If people were more realistic about what they know about the world, I think conversation would be a lot more realistic and less heated. (Yes, this is very unlikely.)
It's not just a matter of "only lawyers can understand this area". Because, given exposure to the same matters, the same laws, regulators, etc., lay business people can become just as expert in legal analysis. They should still hire an attorney, of course, just as a NBA star still has a coach, the Pope a confessor, etc. etc.
And what are those duties, and how they are enforced?
It is nice that there are bars, but do they make any difference?
But just saying it's off the record and billing out as legal research instead of practicing law doesn't protect you.
If it's of any importance, a lawyer should be more than willing to provide their client with their advice in writing.
This isn't much different from how one shouldn't perform high-stakes transactions without the certainty of a written contract.
- It is illegal to bestow legal advice without being a lawyer.
- A lawyer who provides legal advice without a pre-existing relationship could be seen by the court as now acting and thus becoming a person’s lawyer, unwillingly.
The former case is silly and nobody is going to be checking the bar membership of same rando on the internet. The latter case is a legit worry among lawyers.
This is a lie. It's perfectly fine to provide legal advice without being a lawyer. What's not fine is to offer legal advice under the guise of being a lawyer or legal professional.
For example, filling out a form in a bank, or an HR form, or a health insurance form--those are all legal documents. But the bank agent, or the HR agent, or the health insurance rep can all tell you what parts need to be filled out and how, without fear of going to jail. Why? It's not because we've excepted them from some mythical law about providing legal advice. It's because they're not claiming to be lawyers.
I would readily consider self-studying for the bar considering I'm interested in the material and it would be extremely useful, but I have a full-time job and don't want to pay money to an online school just to be able to take a test. It doesn't help that there are almost no good free online materials for learning law, although you can of course just look at / ask about good college curriculums (curricula?) and acquire the materials yourself
I would be surprised that a lawyer would tell you this, because I've never met a lawyer who would. I have met plenty of non-lawyers who think that this is a thing, and in fact on HN, every person who spreads this information is a non-lawyer.
In a nutshell, it boils down to attempts by various state bars a few years ago to treat NOLO and AVVO and other websites as offering legal advice without a law license. But the bars lost almost all of those court cases...because it's okay for people to offer legal advice if they're not a lawyer, the same way it's okay for people to offering medical advice despite not being a doctor.
What's not okay is claiming to be a lawyer or legal professional if you're not one, but offering that as the reason your advice should be trusted. If you make no claim to be a lawyer or legal professional, it's not reasonable for someone to rely on your advice. Of course, they could sue you--but they could sue you whether or not you disclaimed being a lawyer, and either way the case would come down to whether it was reasonable for them to rely on your advice without hiring a lawyer of their own.
Also the laws around lawyers & doctors are different whereas most other professions do not have similar laws. Not surprising these professions all deal with similar situations differently then.
There are a few contemporary services like Workshare that have made inroads in the arena that Autto is entering. Contract workflow is a pretty tough nut to crack. I think the mistake a lot of non-lawyers make when selling to law firms, is they assume that most contract flow can/should be entirely automated. But complex legal drafting is still an exercise that demands a lot of wet brain matter.
Having worked in more than a handful of companies full-time by now I made an interesting observation I intend to learn from and have it inspire future decision making.
Most founders - especially in the earlier stages - don't worry very much about the intricacies of laws and regulation. I can safely say that most companies I worked at entered deeply into gray areas like sailing with a dinghy on high sea and enjoying the great weather. Every experienced captain would argue that is pretty darn dangerous. But the consequence of that would be staying home - meaning "no business".
So my conclusion is that successful entrepreneurs are the kind of people who take risks while being aware, half-aware or totally unaware - because successful entrepreneurs simply don't worry much in general. Sociologically those men and women usually have a somewhat wealthy background having kept them from worrying throughout their youth and hence their brain circuits dealing with worrying are somewhat underdeveloped - I suppose. Some get their finger's burnt and some don't.
This is true of the one-man contractors to multi-billion dollar corporations. Real entrepreneurs don't wing it. And for the ones that don't worry about the compliance stuff, it's because they're paying a ton of money to specialists like me to do the worrying for them.
So most times folks can navigate through life w/o understanding much law, just like non-techies can use telephones w/o understanding how electricity or radios works.
As with most things, its the edge cases that get you in trouble. And, it usually takes more legal expertise than most non-lawyers have to recognize potential legal edge cases.