One thing to note is that the CA statute of frauds renders certain kinds of oral contracts invalid, unless there is some memorandum of the oral contract is in writing. One such contract, as outlined in CA Civil Code Section 1624(a)(7) is:
> A contract, promise, undertaking, or commitment to loan money or to grant or extend credit, in an amount greater than one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000), not primarily for personal, family, or household purposes, made by a person engaged in the business of lending or arranging for the lending of money or extending credit.
This wouldn't seem to apply to equity financings, but I suspect it applies to debt financings. If that's right, an actual "handshake deal" is not legally enforceable absent the kind of e-mail memorialization that PG is talking about. Of course, a "handshake deal" starts to look a lot like a simple written contract if a handshake alone cannot a deal make.
> It's not "rent seeking" to build a value-added service on top of publicly available information, or even to charge for making obscure publicly available information more easily available.
I'm inclined to agree. But perhaps "rent seeking" or not is not the right debate.
It's hard to tease out how much of the value of WL/Lexis/BL is in comprehensive access to cases and documents vs. how much comes from the kind of value added products/services that you mention.
An interesting question is just how valuable these value added services actually are. Whatever value they provide today might reasonably be discounted by their lack of defensibility going forward. As you noted, there is much room for technological disruption here. One could imagine dramatically better products (my thesis is that the right Silicon Valley startup can build them). If WL/Lexis/BL want to survive in the next 5-10 years, they are going to have to get away from publishing and push technology farther, either internally or by acquiring the very few startups who are doing interesting things in this space. What do you make of that thesis? It sounds to me like your thinking about their value add might be clarified by distinguishing between publishing and technology.
> That is why in the discussions with his counsel about a resolution of the case this office sought an appropriate sentence that matched the alleged conduct – a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. While at the same time, his defense counsel would have been free to recommend a sentence of probation.
That is terrible writing. Ms. Ortiz should be doubly ashamed.
What you just identified is precisely what Peter is criticizing here. The whole point is that maybe technology can make this fiction less fictitious.
You may think that the law is necessarily more like politics, and that there's little room for code. But I don't see any reason for that in your comment, which is more just a reaffirmation that the status quo exists.
All of this can be called "legal services." But the extremes, you two are essentially talking about different markets.
Corporate clients will continue to hire the best lawyers and pay high fees when and because the company is on the line.
Most individuals, on the other hand, do not need a Yale Law grad billing $900 an hour to set up a living trust or LLC.
Obviously there's a whole spectrum in between. Just flagging that "Tech will utterly destroy the legal industry" and "We'll always have top lawyers starting at $160K" may be talking past each other a bit.
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We’re building software that will radically change how lawyers approach, analyze, and engage with the law. We use advanced case law parsing and tech-enabled human review to construct a detailed outline of the law. Leveraging that data, we can offer litigators legal search tools that are an order of magnitude better than existing offerings, as well as detailed analytics on legal arguments and AI tools that automatically assess and assemble litigation documents.
We're looking to add a designer to our small team of legal-minded engineers (Stanford, Berkeley, Google) and lawyers (Stanford, Columbia).
The law is intricate. Communicating it clearly is a serious design challenge. We are looking for someone who can shape not only our look and feel, but also how lawyers interact with the law.
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If you're interested in learning more, get in touch: [email protected].
How do you know if it's true? Think through it yourself. Don't look for a hook that's going to make you feel better about accepting something as gospel.