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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

This appears to be the unauthorized practice of law, unless there's something missing from your description.

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.

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> "unless there's something missing from your description."

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...

Thanks for the comment and generosity, this is a work in progress and I’m sorry it set off an alarm bell for you. We posted this to get some usability feedback on what we were working on, it’s not a fully built out description. As background, we’re aware of UPL and we are careful to not provide any form of legal advice. Ironclad is designed to be an administrative tool just like google, email or dropbox would be.

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.

Yes, because everyone should have to get permission from a bureaucrat in order to earn a living.

You're right. Excuse me while I go order a set scalpels and a surgical mask off eBay. Where can I pickup those big cylinders of anesthesia?

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.

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