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Comment by praxeologist | Hacker News Reader

I'd think most attorneys (or whomever) wanting to participate in a site like this might want to upload something such as a photo of their JD. There could be some way to offload the work of the site owners and give at least some credibility.

Anyhow, this site looks pretty awesome and I am going to check it out. As someone hyper-bootstrapping his first startup (poor), a halfassed privacy policy or something may be better than nothing anyhow. Maybe I can get some idea what I will be looking at before I take the dive and hire a real lawyer too.

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Yes, we are planning a verification system for lawyers' profiles, although you can already tell a lot by looking at their profile information (website, twitter, etc)

Thanks, I see these now. I should have looked around more before commenting and I bookmarked it!

Still need verification as a practicing lawyer who is licensed is sometimes different from just getting a JD..

It could be used as a selling point in letting those who get verified add to it telling what specialties they handle, etc.

Almost all states' bar associations have public profiles indicating the license statuses of their lawyers.

California, for example, requires a public email address -- verification can be accomplished by sending a Docracy verification email to the bar-published email address.

Having a JD doesn't make someone a licensed attorney, and I'd seriously question the competence of any attorney willing to participate in a site like this, as doing so would be insurmountably fraught with professional responsibility and legal ethics issues. This is not legal advice.

You nailed it: it's not legal advice, but you might need legal advice from those lawyers, and it's definitely helpful if Docracy helps you contact them. I don't see anything unethical in this, also considering that the service is free for all users, lawyers included.

We actually have pretty reputable contributors, like Gunderson Dettmer LLP. Lawyers who realize that lawyering skills lay beyond standard templates are also generally better (or at least more human) than those who charge you $500 for a template they've been using for years.

Where should the content on this kind of site come from, if not from attorneys? "Contract law hobbyists"?

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