Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

#31

Post by jes » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 11:36 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #30

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…

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

Re: Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

#32

Post by davemel37 » Fri, Jul 03, 2015, 12:07 AM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #30

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…

> "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...

Re: Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

#33

Post by just_a_giraffe » Fri, Jul 03, 2015, 12:56 AM UTC

Doing intelligent templatized form entry seems really convenient. Having signed up with a fake name/email[1], I was expecting to get an idea of what exactly this system would do for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have "preview" functionality for anything, and forces the steps to accomplish something to be _very_ linearized.

I can very much imagine wanting to "jump ahead" in the process when hiring a contractor. Yes, 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.

Re: Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

#34

Post by nkw » Fri, Jul 03, 2015, 3:10 AM UTC

jes wrote: post #31

gamblor956 wrote: post #30

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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

#35

Post by nkw » Fri, Jul 03, 2015, 3:15 AM UTC

jwb119 wrote: post #27

nkw wrote: post #23

I like the 'keeping your legal documents organized'. What is up with the pre-loaded "industry standard" templates? Are you guys a law firm? Do you carry malpractice insurance in case these "industry standard" templates are awful and screw up someone's startup?

We're definitely not a law firm and we're not giving legal advice. Will put some more info on this up soon - we want to make this better.

Cool. I think there is some real potential in this area. Just be careful and get a lawyer on board to guide you through the sticky issues.

Re: Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

#36

Post by gogwilt » Fri, Jul 03, 2015, 4:38 AM UTC

just_a_giraffe wrote: post #33

Doing intelligent templatized form entry seems really convenient. Having signed up with a fake name/email[1], I was expecting to get an idea of what exactly this system would do for me. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have "preview" functionality for anything, and forces the steps to accomplish something to be _very_ linearized. I can very much imagine wanting to "jump ahead" in the process when hiring a contractor…

(I'm also working on this.)

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!

Re: Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

#37

Post by jwb119 » Fri, Jul 03, 2015, 5:02 AM UTC

nkw wrote: post #35

jwb119 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're definitely not a law firm and we're not giving legal advice. Will put some more info on this up soon - we want to make this better.

Cool. I think there is some real potential in this area. Just be careful and get a lawyer on board to guide you through the sticky issues.

Awesome, yep we are very aware of this. Will be updating the copy and making it more clear going forward. Thanks for the encouragement!

Re: Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

#38

Post by donw » Fri, Jul 03, 2015, 5:27 AM UTC

jwb119 wrote: post #14

thenipper wrote: post #13

Are you planning on supporting more then just Dropbox? 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 l…

Yeah Box is great, and I agree a lot of enterprises use it. It'd be cool to work with them as well (though obviously we don't do it now). 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 :)

You also want to provide some information about the team, and some contact information.

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.

Re: Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

#39

Post by jwb119 » Fri, Jul 03, 2015, 7:44 PM UTC

gamblor956 wrote: post #30

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…

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.

Re: Show HN: Ironclad – an automated legal assistant

#40

Post by jwb119 » Sat, Jul 04, 2015, 12:04 AM UTC

Hey everyone, thanks a ton for your comments and interest. Now that we’ve had a chance to get some feedback, we’ll be closing up the site while we make improvements and get some of the things that you suggested in to the product. Please feel free to email admin@ironclad.ai if you’d like to get in touch. We really appreciate your feedback!