Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant
ironclad.ai
ironclad.ai
That said, the best thing I ever developed was my own filing system which ran in parallel with official office filing. I had a folder per case and client which I would keep raw documents and an electronic signed version of our pleadings. I would also have a digital copy of the other side's pleadings run through OCR. This process involved day-to-day work to keep it up to date, BUT it allowed me to answer questions like "Which pleading was it that they filed which said x a month ago?" in seconds instead of minutes/hours without robust search.
I can very much imagine wanting to "jump ahead" in the process when hiring a contractor. Yes, <Person X> hasn't yet informed Ironclad of their existence, but that doesn't stop me as an employer from knowing terms of the contract like compensation. Unfortunately, the workflow here seems to be:
* Get info * Make initial Contractor Agreement * Allow both parties to make incremental edits via dropbox (garnered this from other comments in this thread, so it could be wrong) * When both parties agree, move on to the contracts part and repeat the "offline negotiation".
Every contract I've ever worked has been negotiated in person, and either there has been a fully filled contract (save for my details and signature) or no contract at all. I prefer the former case by far, as the latter ends up involving a face-to-face negotiation without the fine print, and inevitably holds up work when the contract has some unsavory fine print.
Having a system provide both "checkboxes" for doing things in a normal-ish way AND long-term tracking of documents would make my life a lot easier.
[1] No privacy policy means no PII data from me. You've seen plenty of this already in the comments, though.
Allowing you to enter the contract details immediately definitely sounds like it would make things much more convenient. We have been keeping track of ways to make all of our templates more usable, and this is a great idea.
Thanks for trying our our platform, and for your feedback!
I do nights/weekend IT support/systems design and setup for some small law practices and most of them are on Box. It's what has been recommended by the bar here in Massachusetts. Plus I've found it to fit a law office's workflow pretty well.
Before I could really evaluate this for a law office there would need to be a solid privacy policy in place as well as at least a blog post about data security.
I like that you're trying to move quick, but lawyers tend to move pretty slowly in adopting new technology. The concept is cool but as it stands now it'd be a hard sell.
Good points on the privacy policy and data security - it's a priority but not reflected on the site right now. We'll do that.
Thanks for taking a look :)
I love the idea, but right now, your landing page looks very suspect. No contact information, no US phone number or office address, nothing about the team or corporate details...
These are all key factors that indicate to potential customers that you are a legitimate business.
Privacy policy, terms of use, data security policies, and so on are also going to be very important to your customers. If you have questions in that arena, feel free to ping me -- email is in the profile.
The best way to jump right in is to go through signup and do a Letter of Intent (LOI) - you can just sign one with yourself to try it (use the same email, but use a slightly different name so you can tell the parties apart).
Thanks for taking a look!
There are thousands of different NDA and contractor forms floating out there on the Internet but they don't come with explanations of the qualifications/experience of the drafter.
This is really interesting and something we're looking at. Looks like you're an attorney as well.. let me know if you have an interest in chatting about this!
"The best way to jump right in is to go through signup". Wrong answer.
Do you have a legal opinion that you are not engaged in the unauthorized practice of law? LegalZoom had a lot of trouble with that.[1] Even after some wins in court, they operate only in 41 US states, and have lawyers and paralegals on staff.
Badly drafted contracts can cause big trouble later. You need to go to a lot of effort to convince customers you know what you're doing.
[1] http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/latest_legal_vict...
While the parent comment was a bit harsh, literally the first point on your landing page is "A modern legal assistant", which really does sound like you're managing parts of the legal process that a lawyer normally would.
Legal assistants are often carrying out the instructions of lawyers. I've never seen one that operated independent of a lawyer.
What industry? The legal industry? Transportation? Software? I agree with the feedback others are giving. The product interests me but there isn't nearly enough information for me to sign up, let alone trust you with any part of a legal document.
Is there anything else that interests you about the product that you'd want to know more about?
So my question would be something along the line of how do you address this seemingly unavoidable necessity?
I think the process server / courier is an interesting analogy. We're definitely not trying to replace lawyers here, but we do want to separate out the admin work and make the whole process more efficient.
Collecting information and using it to fill out templates forms a significant portion of the practice of transactional law (i.e., contracts). Most specifically, as to the legal judgement of what form(s), statements, or clauses are appropriate, what the terms should be, etc.
I'll give you guys a week to rethink your service and get a lawyer on board, but next Wednesday if your service hasn't changed I'm contacting the CA State Bar.
edit - actually the comment you were responding to was pretty asinine re: reporting them to the CA bar, but I think there is a reasonable basis for requiring licensing of certain professions.
I love how your assumption jumps to them missing something vs. you missing something.
My understanding was this is simply dynamically plugging in your personal information into a template - which you are providing (as opposed to actually picking and choosing language and terms).
You might have legal tunnel vision looking for the extreme possible interpretations, versus what the average user interprets. This landing page is not a legal document, it is a sales page, and a pretty clear one at that...
That said, we will take down the landing page and update the copy (which we’ve intended to do all along once we got some feedback). If you’re willing to take some time to talk to another HN user, I’d very much like to address your concerns, hear your feedback, and use any ideas you have for moving forward. Would you have some time on Monday? I’m at jwb119@gmail.com if you want to email me so we can set something up.
Beagle uses NLP to provide you with a broad understanding of which party in the agreement is liable or responsible for what. In addition, it provides real-time negotiation tools. Reach out to us if you'd like a demo, we're currently bringing on new customers in private beta.