Can Paperless Docs Reduce Startup Legal Costs? | Hacker News Reader

Can Paperless Docs Reduce Startup Legal Costs?

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15 pointsbproper9 comments

We already do documents for clients in electronic form where possible. The limitation usually is outside bodies such as banks who insist on 'wet ink' signatures.

It does reduce fussing, for example when signing a multiparty contract, but it doesn't fundamentally change or services.

Standard contracts were always available and any decent lawyer has their own precedents, but part of what the client is paying for is how to use those precedents.

Just like standard open source software is available, but people still pay developers and sys admins...

I don't see how. The legal costs aren't the paper, but the work that goes into making the paper. Making bits instead of paper is going to be just as costly because that's how lawyers make their money.

No, the point is that the contracts are standardized.

There's a github for legal docs mentioned. So you can just pull off a standard "NDA", and not worry so much about writing your own boilerplate, or searching for landmines in your opponent's terms.

I wonder why law firms don't just sell ready-made and digitally signed boiler plate like that.

Law firms are being disrupted like many other industries because of the Internet. They are set up with lots of overhead, expensive service based employees, and have a lot of mouths to feed. And since it's service based they have an incentive to bill for the maximum allowable hours that they can bill. Depending on where you set the fee cap for your round you can bet that most law firms will (magically) end up within 10% of that cap.

They do, they sell ready made contracts. They just charge you for writing them ;)

It's not the cost of the paper. Some costs originate from delays, caused by the fact that paper travels slow. If the stakeholders can digitally sign documents on their laptop or mobile phone, processes can go much faster.

If you're getting charged for the time paper's in transit through the postal system, you need a different law firm.

there are changes in dealing with "paper". for instance, if a lawyer has to sign a doc then pdf it and send it, the law firm is going to bill the time that the paralegal took to print, scan, and email that document. this stuff takes longer than you might expect.

that said, the cost of the paralegal isn't the big one among lawyers' fees. fred is just talking generally about a "paperless" process -- a frictionless one that will necessarily have to happen digitally.

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