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Comment by joelbluminator | Hacker News Reader

Law and accountancy is much harder to outsource than programming. You usually have to be U.S certified so thats pretty much protected.

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You have the Ubers and AirBnBs circumventing laws around the world and you think it's hard to optimize for a remote law and accountancy practice? Just have offshore remoters do the bulk of work and have it signed by a certified local lawyer / accountant.

It's not impossible I guess, you will need to find people who know U.S law well. If you're talking about accountancy that's pretty complex stuff. You can outsource the grunt work easily (going over Excel sheets, that has been ousourced for decades already) but the substantial work no, I don't think it's that easy.

I don't think it's easy either. There are smart people everywhere in the world. If these people could be easily paid and could get their results validated by a local expert, there would be a lot of financial incentive for these smart people to learn the US law, for example, and create case files for the local experts to evaluate and sign on.

Would it cut the need for the local experts? No. Would it reduce their numbers? Maybe, it could also diversify them. Would it lower the cost for the service? I also think so.

Would it result in the "superstar" local experts (to use TFA's terminology) making huge amounts of money? Almost certainly.

I think the big disruption will be automation especially for accountancy, so much of it is grunt work.

Certified lawyers/accountants have ethical compliance responsibilities. They should be doing meaningful review, not just "signing off." There are savings to be realized, but they are more limited than one might think. The difference here is that there are professional associations with both the ability to discipline people who don't follow the rules, and a deep interest in doing so.

You can do meaningful reviews of folders others have prepared for you, others that get paid pennies compared to what you would pay locally.

> The difference here is that there are professional associations with both the ability to discipline people who don't follow the rules, and a deep interest in doing so.

If I understand correctly, then indeed yes, it would be hard to disrupt this space. But I have a feeling someone smarter than me, perhaps even yourself, will find a way to go around it. At one point taxi medallions seemed unmovable.

I think, for law, you could probably get some utility out of lawyers within the same families of legal system (i.e. english descended systems have a lot of similarities) but the specialization here is too extreme... That all said, I've got a relative that's a military lawyer who has done the standard thing of being regularly relocated across the globe - and he is still bar certified in Mass. I imagine if you could build enough of an expectation of work you could take raw law school grads in Mexico City and prep them to pass the NY/Mass/Whatever bar exam as is relevant to your company. This would be a big investment on both the individual and company's side but maybe there's some space there to cut under standard US rates?

Taxi disruption worked to various degrees depending on how much the local certification meant - in most locales it was just "Can drive cars" - in areas where there is a geographic knowledge test the ride-share disrupters have fared less well. I think it's essentially the same for lawyers - their certification is extremely non-trivial, a lot of laywers only ever get certified in a single state due to how much of an investment it is and how little value you get out of it.

I could see a proposition coming from the opposite side - trying to unify portions of the law so that the regional specialty becomes irrelevant - but you'd need to fight against a lot of unfriendly folks and sovereignty concerns to do anything on that front.

Instead, the market players we can see in the legal space today focus elsewhere - legal matters that are predictable enough that you can essentially mass-produce responses for needs. For common contract law this seems like a great fit - but as soon as anything gets complicated you need to pull a warm body into the mix.

To paraphrase Morgan Freeman in the Dark Knight:

So your target for disruption is law firms and your strategy is to do something illegal to build a huge business that destroys them?!?

The problem with law and accounting is that the skills are country-specific. You can outsource software or radiology because computers and bodies are pretty much the same across the world, but a Chilean lawyer does not know USA law (and vice versa), nor does an Albanian accountant know USA tax law. So you can't "reuse" the existing specialists, you have to train them for a weird niche that will be usable only for outsourcing, since they can't serve local customers with knowledge about USA principles, which are different.

While I agree that you need to retrain, I think the economic incentives might push some people to say, "instead of training for my Chilean law practice, I'd rather learn the ins and outs of the USA law so that I may outsource for double or triple the money I would make". Of course this is just wild speculation, but I feel like the dollar's power has the ability to alter career choices.

For lawyers they can only practice law in the states in which they have passed the bar in. So, it's even more restricted. If you want to practice in another state, then I think you need to take the bar for that state. It's a 3 day test.

You also have to take the CPA exam to become a CPA, but that looks like you can transfer your accreditation to another state.

You could set up a US Law school in another country

There's no shortage of lawyers and law school grads from 2nd and 3rd tier schools aren't actually all that well paid on average. The big NY white shoe firm salaries? They mostly come from a relatively small number of schools, students who did well, often had good internships or clerkships, maybe were on law review, maybe have connections, etc.

The school is less of a problem than the state-by-state bar exam, I believe.

You don't need to pass the bar to be a paralegal & do the grunt work while the firm is billing US rates. Bigger law and accounting firms already utilize this model, whereby entry level employees do the bulk of the raw work, and the audit report/advisory/legal filing gets pushed up the hierarchy while being simultaneously refined and improved, sometimes sent back down the chain. Many revisions later, the final version is signed off, by someone who has passed the state bar, and possibly has their name on the building - if the client is a big deal.

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