In my experience, this is the bread and butter for a lot of law firms. Especially for simpler things like rental contracts and property conveyancing etc. It's got to be disrupted soon enough!
Lawyers usually use forms / boilerplate because they have worked in the past. Many of these forms are the sum total of thousands of hours of time and refinement over tens of years. Nobody wants to pay a lawyer to reproduce that -- at least, nobody in retail law (big corporate settlement contracts? Those see many many hours of revision and negotion, but ultimately are still based on a core form that rarely changes).
I agree that a copy+paste job seems like you are getting cheated. But like an engineer, a lawyer isn't charging you for typing, or turning a screwdriver. They are charging for knowing what contract you need, etc.
What's honestly shocking right now are the alternatives. What LegalZoom gave my friend to start an LLC would have been malpractice had it come from an actual lawyer. (But surprise! You can't sue legal zoom as easily for that thing as you can a lawyer).
Imo what really needs to go is hourly billing. But that's another conversation, and a really hard problem.
Honest legal Invoice
Task. By. Rate.
------------------------------------
Fix form. Paralegal $ 100
Knowing what Lawyer $ 3,900
form to fix.
Accepting. Firm $ 1000
liability
------------------------------------
True disruption changes the obvious problem above: how do you replace the cost of professional judgement and trust?
If you're an engineer today, you don't get paid poorly because Mongo and Postgres already exist. You get paid well if you know whether a document store or a RDS is the best fit for the systems problem at hand based on a careers worth of experience.
As someone who has done both for a living, it's shocking how much overlap there is (overlap that I assume exists in among doctors, accountants, consultants).
If a standard, simple will is entirely boilerplate with some search-and-replace, then it can be replaced with an app.
You decide whether to pay the lawyer based on your confidence that the boilerplate stuff is right for your case, and will hold up in court. Individuals are likely to take this risk, large companies are not. So the large companies will still get boilerplate search-and-replace, but with the added confidence that they have lowered their risk.
/s
This company is about the closest I've seen to disrupting anything so far.
My experience and observable reality show that it's hard. There's a reason even the techiest of companies still pay an army of lawyers in house and still go to the best firms for major transactions and disputes: