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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"

#61

Post by sunchild »

grellas wrote: post #55

Having been in Big Law myself, I have previously set forth my thoughts at some length on this topic (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1648342 ). Fundamentally, law remains a guild system, with the governing licensing restrictions severely limiting the ability to innovate. Only licensed persons can be owners of firms and only licensed persons can provide the key services. No fee-splitting or profit sharing is p…

This is a great comment, but one nitpick: "No fee-splitting or profit sharing is permitted with any person who is not licensed."

I believe this is no longer the case the UK and some other places.

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

#62

Post by sunchild »

VanL wrote: post #43
sunchild wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting - I would be interested in chatting with you too. I am a lawyer at a Big law firm. One of the things that I have been doing (which clients love) is writing software to automate or enhance parts of what I do.

I used to do this, too. It drove me crazy that my firm owned my work, though. Perhaps you have a more favorable arrangement with your employer?

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

#63

Post by sunchild »

etherael wrote: post #41
jgfoot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although there are some laws that can kind of be represented as computer code (for example, TurboTax captures a good portion of the tax code, and programming a 55 mph speed limit into a car shouldn't be hard) for the most part the law acts as a system for delegating to judges limited authority to exercise discretion. Ultimately, the decisions are made through that discretion, and they aren't entirely predictable. If…

I'll give it a look in, but yes, my general opinion is that discretion leads to subjectivity and unfairness. Unfortunately the attempts to reduce discretion have historically resulted in malicious arbitrariness, sentencing teenagers to sex offender status for sexting, silly three strikes laws ad et al. At the same time it seems to me that a more richly detailed granular objective system with oversight into the actual…

Also, you're focusing on statutory law. There is a whole, great, big, huge area of law that is contracts made between two arms-length parties.

Very little of what I do as a lawyer involves interpreting or applying specific statutory laws.

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

#64

Post by sunchild »

VanL wrote: post #53
sunchild wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am doing this with patents. Google "Killing patents with Python" if you want to see the presentation.

Shoot me an email. I didn't find your presentation. I did find a Yahoo Answers on "Can a 4 foot long ball python kill a 4 lb. kitten?"

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

#65

Post by JoeAltmaier »

A model of circuitous legal babbling. It took until the 34th paragraph to spit out the crux of the argument. Save you time, here it is:

1) More sophisticated clients armed with more information and greater market power to rein in costs.

2) A globalized economy, which increases the complexity of legal work while exposing U.S. lawyers to greater competition.

3) Powerful information technology that can automate or replace many of the traditional, billable functions performed by lawyers.

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

#66

Post by scythe »

etherael wrote: post #52
scythe wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>a standard of objective fairness and justice which would be better defined by deterministic, logical languages like programming languages rather than fuzzy, broad languages like English. Can you formally define concepts and events occurring in a "fuzzy, broad" world in a useful way? It is kind of amusing to imagine that someone out there is sitting around with a recursively-enumerable objective statement of what con…

To the extent that applications defining the class to which you believe your behaviour exists and allowing you to test it with a high degree of specificity, yes. There have been explicit ventures along this exact path previously in a more limited extent, that being financial products having python based code that would allow the investors to put in a set of assumptions and see what the product model would do under th…

>To the extent that applications defining the class to which you believe your behaviour exists and allowing you to test it with a high degree of specificity, yes.

I'm operating on the assumption that you dropped the word "belongs" somewhere in there.

>There have been explicit ventures along this exact path previously in a more limited extent, that being financial products having python based code that would allow the investors to put in a set of assumptions and see what the product model would do under those circumstances.

In the same way that there have been explicit ventures along the path of the axiomatization of mathematics, yes.

>writing clearly delineated code that deals with reality in a concrete fashion

Show me some clearly delineated code that deals with the workings of a single sheet of A4 paper in a concrete fashion, and then we can consider the law. Fairness is not a fuzzy concept, it is a human concept, humans as much a part of the universe as any other. It is not really harder to measure fairness than to measure the electromagnetic interaction.

We spoon-feed our problems to computer systems so that they may analyze the parts which we cannot; your precept of a computerized legal system is assuming a priori the lack of spoon-feeding, since corruption can enter the picture here just as easily as in the old system, cf. LulzSec. Thusfar there are two pieces of secure code in existence: seL4 and qmail, and I'm not sure about the former.

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

#67

Post by asr »

This article correctly points out that pricing for legal services is undergoing a shift toward the true marginal cost for the service. So the law firm business model where much of partners’ profits are markups on simple, repetitive work done by junior associates is on its way out.

That said, the doom and gloom of this article (and much of the profession) is overblown. Maybe it’s because law is such a conservative profession, but any change is greeted as if it were the coming of the Four Horsemen. It’s as if the entire software industry spent its time worrying about how the internet was going to put Windows programmers out of business, instead of being excited about the opportunities it presented.

Major law firms are filled with smart and experienced lawyers who actually provide a lot of value to their clients. That value is still worthwhile--as the article points out, the rule of law is not going away.

As a law school student, I'm not (unduly) worried about this. Sure, there will be some winners and losers, but that’s what happens in business--and basically what this is about is that law firms are looking more like businesses. Why should I expect anyone to feel sorry for me because of that?

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

#68

Post by marshray »

iwwr wrote: post #30
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 ra…

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.

Then who else is to blame? Nearly everyone with in the system with significant decision authority is either an active member of the bar or was before they became a politician.

Voters? Perhaps. But usually the choice is between two lawyers.

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

#69

Post by thwarted »

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.

That is kind of what we were heading towards in another thread from another post [1].

There seem to be a lot of law/lawyer related posts in past week.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693432

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

#70

Post by VanL »

sunchild wrote: post #62
VanL wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting - I would be interested in chatting with you too. I am a lawyer at a Big law firm. One of the things that I have been doing (which clients love) is writing software to automate or enhance parts of what I do.

I used to do this, too. It drove me crazy that my firm owned my work, though. Perhaps you have a more favorable arrangement with your employer?

I made an arrangement immediately when I started. I told them I do code on the side, and that I had other people that I worked with on that code.

They agreed that they pay me for legal work, not for code. Thus, the tools I build are mine, but the analysis and output of those tools may be theirs if I am using the tools for their benefit.

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