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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

rayiner makes a great point about (and possibly created customer demand for) the security of your service being a selling point. I'm wondering if billing firms could fall under client-attorney confidentiality, but I doubt it.

On the other side, your firm has placed itself in the unique position of being able to price-compare different law firms, and even different customers of the same firm. You could pivot/expand into a price-shopping service (kayak for law firms), a law-firm analytics provider (giving a/b testing results and other demographic info to law firms, leading to better price stratifying), or a service for law firms to gain pricing information about their competitors.

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Co-founder here. Legal bills are not considered "work product" so the client can share them if they choose.

The content of legal bills is very important to protect. We have technical safeguards as well as management/process safeguards. The most important of which is limiting the number of people with access to actual content.

We have data and can price compare across geographies and law firms. But it is important to remember that each transaction is unique. That's why we don't release any of that information currently. If we find the right way and the right venue to share that aggregated information, we will do so if we think it is in the best interest of our customers.

Great concept, but not sure about the claim that legal bills aren't "work product" - it depends on what they say. And it's quite probable that the most effective legal bills for data analysis purposes (i.e. detailed ones) would contain work product or attorney-client privileged information. When I was a practicing lawyer, I always redacted bills before filing them in court to support fee petitions.

Separate issue whether disclosure of the bill to you as vendor, with a documented expectation of confidentiality, would constitute waiver either of WP or A/C privilege. No obvious reason that disclosure to your service would be different than disclosure to TyMetrix, Serengeti, or Sky Analytics, assuming your T&Cs are well-crafted. But obviously check with your lawyers on that.

Also, purely from a business standpoint, you can bet that some lawyers will raise the confidentiality objection to discourage/resist adoption.

All is to say, the issue is an important one. Glad to see you're taking it seriously. Good luck!

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