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"The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

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Re: "The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

#21

Post by sunchild »

wooUK wrote: post #11

I've spent the past 10 years working in global corporate law firms as a software developer and have witnessed this change first hand. The legal profession is based around chargeable hours. This is not a good deal for the consumer of legal services. Billing by the hour does not encourage lawyers to work more efficiently or effectively, in fact it rewards the opposite. Recently larger clients have started to stand up t…

Based on your experience, I'd love to chat with you offline. My law firm (together with another firm in London) is building software for deal lawyers. If you're interested in meeting, you can reach me via the email address on my firm's page: http://yusonirvine.com/

If nothing else, I'd like to introduce you to my UK counterparts.

Re: "The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

#22

Post by gjm11 »

Robin_Message wrote: post #15
praptak wrote: post #7

Shrinking market for legal services is good news to me. People becoming less litigious? It is actually possible to do anything without a highly paid expert to tell you whether you're not breaking some complicated law? Does not sound like something to worry about.

The market is not shrinking; the problem is access to justice for ordinary people who cannot afford $500 an hour. Also, perverse incentives like "No win, no fee" encourage settlements and litigation without helping those who have been genuinely wronged or have an actual case that needs to go to trial.

How does no-win-no-fee do that? If you haven't been genuinely wronged and don't have an actual case that needs to go to trial, you can't realistically expect to win, so NWNF doesn't make much difference.

What NWNF is supposed to do is to make it possible for the not-rich to afford to defend themselves when wronged (either by taking legal action, or by declining to settle unfavourably when threatened with legal action). That doesn't seem terribly perverse, it's the opposite of "encouraging settlements", and it does help those who have been genuinely wronged.

The downside is that lawyers operating on a NWNF basis may be unwilling to take on any case whose prospects for success are poor. I suppose that might count as "encouraging settlements" -- in cases where you're not very likely to win and can't afford to pay the legal fees. I have trouble seeing why that is a bad thing.

What am I missing?

Re: "The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

#23

Post by sunchild »

swampthing wrote: post #20
noonespecial wrote: post #9

“The biggest problem,” says Ury, “is that ordinary citizens cannot afford to hire a lawyer. The bread and butter of small firm practices are criminal defense work, wills and trusts, leases, closings and divorces. Yet in Connecticut, 80 to 85 percent of divorces have a self-represented party because most families can’t afford to hire one lawyer, let alone two. Nearly 90 percent of criminal cases are self-represented o…

I hope you don't take this as a flippant comment, because it isn't meant to be, but the answer to your latter question is - it's what the market bears (or did bear). There's plenty of lawyers out there - but, like in programming, there are a lot fewer good ones. In general, people are willing to pay $500 / hour because they can't find one of similar quality for a lower price.

Quality is very, very difficult to measure in this context. It's a bit like measuring the quality of a doctor or other professional whose advice you need to trust beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In the end, law firms tend to trade on longstanding reputation, which is a fine, but imperfect, way of handling this problem. These days, there is no reason to assume that high rates == quality, or vice versa.

The market will sort this out eventually: right now clients are making pricing demands on big law firms that are cutting their margins significantly. As a result, firms are ditching costs in a kind of emergency sale. My own opinion is that many firms are gutting their best assets (their new, young lawyers) in order to preserve the partner profits, and that will be their downfall. Meanwhile, the next generation of lawyers will be free to charge much less, and will actually make more money.

Re: "The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

#24

Post by sunchild »

swampthing wrote: post #14

This article is spot-on (I'm one of the few on HN that have worked as an attorney in biglaw). One theme it barely touched is that, like any other technology, legal innovations inevitably get commoditized. Fundamentally, law firms have been unable to properly adjust to this commoditization due to a lack of technology (outsourcing is a short term solution). The only solutions they come up with are to cut overhead costs…

Exactly! What I've learned, though, is that there is always a need for a human being at the end of the process. That's where lawyers will always be needed: to exercise nuanced judgment that just cannot be systematized (yet). The trick is to be a lawyer who can work as part of a bigger process that includes smart technologies and less expensive (and perhaps, less skilled) labor.

Re: "The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

#25

Post by noonespecial »

swampthing wrote: post #20
noonespecial wrote: post #9

“The biggest problem,” says Ury, “is that ordinary citizens cannot afford to hire a lawyer. The bread and butter of small firm practices are criminal defense work, wills and trusts, leases, closings and divorces. Yet in Connecticut, 80 to 85 percent of divorces have a self-represented party because most families can’t afford to hire one lawyer, let alone two. Nearly 90 percent of criminal cases are self-represented o…

I hope you don't take this as a flippant comment, because it isn't meant to be, but the answer to your latter question is - it's what the market bears (or did bear). There's plenty of lawyers out there - but, like in programming, there are a lot fewer good ones. In general, people are willing to pay $500 / hour because they can't find one of similar quality for a lower price.

Oh, I know the market bore it and then some. The question is why? And more importantly, was it an isolated fluke of an economy/politic gone crazy? If so, its about to correct fiercely and get a little extra kick from a frustrated populace who rightly felt that access to justice was snatched from them.

There's plenty of lawyers out there - but, like in programming, there are a lot fewer good ones. In general, people are willing to pay $500 / hour because they can't find one of similar quality for a lower price.

We still find people representing themselves because they can't "scrape together a retainer". They're not trying to hire $500/hour guys. They'd hire anyone that'd take their case for what they had. The law has become so twisted that its genuinely long, hard work just to get a case together and get in the door. There's a minimum barrier to entry that the average joe just can't meet and the most inexpensive of lawyers can't make a living doing. The work is too much and the people have too little. Its not the lawyers. The whole system is failing. Its just failing from the bottom up. Its only just now effecting the $500/hour level.

If a few poor people here and there end up representing themselves its no big deal. They just operate at a huge disadvantage and get screwed. If most people are forced to represent themselves or go with an overworked public defender the whole system will crack into to very distinct parts.

Re: "The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

#26

Post by sunchild »

swampthing wrote: post #17
ph0rque wrote: post #10

What would be really nice is if law was machine-readable (and interpretable). But that would probably require computers being able to understand language.

There's projects on this - one of the best known ones (to my knowledge) is the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse Project: http://www.lexmachina.org/

Yes, litigation and compliance tend to lead the way when it comes to extracting meaning from legal data pools. In my opinion, the single biggest obstacle to getting legal knowledge to play nice with software is the fact that it is all "silo'ed" due to: (1) being in MS Word format, (2) being confidential information, and (3) the lack of conventions/standards in legal documents.

The good news, though, is that legal documents tend to follow a fairly narrow channel of variations, when isolated to particular practice areas (e.g., leases, sales of goods, service agreements, motions, etc.)

I've always wanted to run a huge number of documents through Beyesian filters or something similar to develop some interesting classification rules, but it's damn hard to get a pool of representative documents that isn't strictly confidential.

Re: "The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

#27

Post by sunchild »

chopsueyar wrote: post #5

Khan Academy Law School?

Law School doesn't really teach what lawyers need to practice law. I've been tempted to do some videos on open source compliance, basics of contract negotiations, etc. but I just don't have enough time to do everything I want to! Maybe if someone else wants to collaborate, I would make it more of a priority.

Re: "The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

#28

Post by OstiaAntica »

swampthing wrote: post #20
noonespecial wrote: post #9

“The biggest problem,” says Ury, “is that ordinary citizens cannot afford to hire a lawyer. The bread and butter of small firm practices are criminal defense work, wills and trusts, leases, closings and divorces. Yet in Connecticut, 80 to 85 percent of divorces have a self-represented party because most families can’t afford to hire one lawyer, let alone two. Nearly 90 percent of criminal cases are self-represented o…

I hope you don't take this as a flippant comment, because it isn't meant to be, but the answer to your latter question is - it's what the market bears (or did bear). There's plenty of lawyers out there - but, like in programming, there are a lot fewer good ones. In general, people are willing to pay $500 / hour because they can't find one of similar quality for a lower price.

Most legal work isn't a market, it is a racket. Lawyers in Congress and state houses write deliberately complex, yet often vague, "laws" in order to create business for their pals in the legal guild (where they typically join them after the law passes). They also design various malpractice laws and penalties to generate huge payouts to the legal suits. From health care to IP to shareholder issues, "Lawyer up!" is the intentional purpose of U.S. public policy.

Re: "The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

#29

Post by Zumzoa »

sunchild wrote: post #26
swampthing wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's projects on this - one of the best known ones (to my knowledge) is the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse Project: http://www.lexmachina.org/

Yes, litigation and compliance tend to lead the way when it comes to extracting meaning from legal data pools. In my opinion, the single biggest obstacle to getting legal knowledge to play nice with software is the fact that it is all "silo'ed" due to: (1) being in MS Word format, (2) being confidential information, and (3) the lack of conventions/standards in legal documents. The good news, though, is that legal doc…

The only word-processed files that might be non-confidential I can think of are contracts made in the past couple of decades between companies that have both declared bankruptcy. Either that or public EULAs.

Re: "The legal profession is undergoing a massive structural shift"

#30

Post by iwwr »

noonespecial wrote: post #9

“The biggest problem,” says Ury, “is that ordinary citizens cannot afford to hire a lawyer. The bread and butter of small firm practices are criminal defense work, wills and trusts, leases, closings and divorces. Yet in Connecticut, 80 to 85 percent of divorces have a self-represented party because most families can’t afford to hire one lawyer, let alone two. Nearly 90 percent of criminal cases are self-represented o…

It's not just a lawyer failure, but a legal system collapse. People are being denied justice.

The lawyers themselves are not necessarily to blame. There are two or three interlinked aspects:

1. The growth in regulations, which draws away limited legal resources toward big companies, leaving less (or higher fees) for criminal or civil defense

2. The growth in criminal prosecution of victimless crimes and especially ramping up the war on drugs

3. The collusion between politicians and the prison industry, which has created a monetary incentive to incarcerate people (looking 'tough on crime' has more than just electoral benefits)

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