Ask HN: Is there a “law/legal” bootcamp for developers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a “law/legal” bootcamp for developers?

6 pointssandwichbop7 comments

"Ignorance of the law is no excuse”

How can you learn about law and legal to work confidently as a developer? Where do you learn what you need to do due diligence for your projects?

I'm not a lawyer, and it's hurting my confidence to create projects as a solo developer. With licenses, privacy policies, terms of service, managing user data, compliance, etc; the biggest roadblock to all my projects has been thinking about the legal aspects.

Most of the material online worsen my confidence when everything is wrapped around IANAL or "this is not legal advice."

Anecdotally, it seems that most projects with small teams don't even bother and just "deploy now, worry later", like copy pasting some privacy policy from a generator without reviewing it themselves.

If you're already established, it make sense to just have some dedicated in-house legal department but what about when you're starting out? A solution seems to have some dedicate lawyer you can consult, but I'm under the impression that unless you have some friend who's a lawyer, the hourly fees are already more than server costs, killing motivation to even bother bootstrapping innovative ideas.

Is there a way to learn how to do legal basics yourself besides going to law school for X years?

Recovering lawyer here.

The main reason bootcamps like this don't exist is because there's no "one size fits all" approach to law. The right legal approach for YOU depends on how deep your pockets are, how much risk tolerance you have, what you're building, which tools you're using, how your company is structured, where you're located, where your users are located, etc.

For example, the "right" user agreement for a team in one state might be very different from that of a team in another state, even if their products are nearly identical.

Knowing the "right" answer also isn't as simple as memorizing the general rules, or even the exceptions (or the exceptions to the exceptions, or the exceptions to the exceptions to the exceptions...). Lawyers weigh the general rules against the specific facts of your case, procedural considerations (e.g., which court would we want to have jurisdiction if there were a dispute over X?), precedent (i.e., how would the court likely rule on X, based on its past decisions?), business considerations (e.g., is X approach cost-effective in the real world?), etc.

It would be enormously difficult to condense all of that into a bootcamp format that delivered anything of real value.

Reading all the Nolo books and taking your community college’s class on business law will help. Also, look for webinars on upcoming regulation by firms and ask questions. It’s not something you can really hope to master and you’ll probably only ever be a curator/selector of phrasing to use, at most, but you can become fairly fluent.

I remember seeing some Nolo books at my uni's library, do you have any recommendations to read when starting out? Will read as much as I can.

Everything remotely relevant is probably good. The first one I read (in the US) was Incorporate Your Business. A lot of topics are connected there and the state-specific differences helped me understand the broader mindset required to operate nationally. https://www.amazon.com/Incorporate-Your-Business-Step-Step/d...

Most places offer a plain English explanation of their license, or use a common license that has an explanation somewhere. If you aren't sure, contact the company and ask them. Many companies would be happy to answer a basic question about how you can use their product or what tier you fit into. Just get ask for a copy of their explanation/permission in writing.

Unless you have secured a lawyer as your counsel, you will always be told by lawyers and laypeople that their advice is not to be considered legal advice. Some states/courts/judges have taken a fanatical approach that even helping your spouse fill out legal documents is considered "practicing law" and would require going to law school and passing the bar, or face criminal charges. I find this to be absurd and feel that this speaks to the self-revering, big ego, elitist, nature of many courts/governments and many of their employees.

So the advice or explanations that you are getting are likely good if you're cross referencing multiple sources. People are just covering themselves. It's it's important to remember that the law is such a big thing that nobody knows it all, and that it involves people who make mistakes. So you can get multiple answers for the same question, or end up with an incompetent judge. The best thing to do is make sure you protect yourself personally with a legal entity like an LLC and insurance would probably be a good idea too.

https://tldrlegal.com/

Thank you, I appreciate your response. I agree that establishing an LLC is great to cover most risk and definitely on my todo list.

But do you know of any resources for learning the other legal aspects of development besides software licenses? For example, I never heard about legal insurance for developers before.

I should had worded my question better but software licensing in specific is the only thing I'm very comfortable with. It's everything else related to development that I struggle with. (for example, terms of services. Can you moderate user generated content without unnecessary risk? Seems like the publisher vs platform isn't even settled rn with big companies)

I meant general liability insurance for the LLC.

I think we would need to know specifics to really weigh in. I still think if you look up multiple resources for the topic you want to cover, then you can get sufficient advice. Most things can be covered in a license/eula and if structured right, will give you a lot of protection. This shouldn't be very expensive to have a lawyer set up if you can't find one of the standard ones that work for you. If you're really that concerned with the minor details and edge cases, then I assume you also have retained a personal lawyer for all the legal risks you face as a regular citizen. If you haven't, then try to apply that same logic here - that you aren't doing anything that risky and can follow basic advice or best practices. You probably aren't a high risk target (personally or company) unless you are doing sketchy things, pissing people off, or are high profile wealthy.

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