As a lawyer who codes (though I don’t currently work as either a lawyer or a coder) I thought this article does a great job of explaining where coding fits into law. At least in my experience, coding is a “legal-adjacent” skill: coding is neither necessary nor sufficient for good lawyering. But there are deep conceptual similarities between coding and lawyering, and knowing how to do one job well can certainly make some parts of the other job easier.
For example: redrafting a contract is a lot like refactoring code. (Make sure that terms are only defined in one place; consider and account for edge cases; be aware of how changes in one area affect dependencies elsewhere, etc.).
If, like me, you’re allergic to repetitive, time-consuming tasks, coding is a way to potentially make your lawyering job go faster. I know lawyers who’ve used a combination of Python scripts and Zapier steps to fully automate client intake, for example.
HOWEVER! I’m pretty confident that coding will never become a core legal competency. Coding and lawyering are different roles, with different outputs, serving different stakeholders. Instead what’s more likely to happen is that coding will gradually eliminate a whole swath of tasks that we once assumed only lawyers could do — until we realized that those tasks were just algorithms in disguise, and therefore automate-able.
Like most other knowledge workers, lawyers are going to be responsible for managing — and applying wisdom and discernment — to the outputs that algorithms/software generates. And that’s a good thing! It’ll mean that lawyers are doing more of what they do best.
An interesting idea. In my experience it’s investors, not founders, who are often the source of complexity in startup agreements. I’ve found that angel investors or investors without a huge amount of experience with common practice in the YC/SV world struggle with concepts like SAFEs and convertible notes — even if they’re otherwise sophisticated investors. And those types of investors are often the only ones ready to bet money on very early stage startups.
All that’s to say: don’t neglect the educational aspect of what you’re selling. Make it easy for founders to explain how your documents works, and make it easy for investors to trust the documents you’ve prepared.
This is a great feedback! I have never considered this aspect before. I think it makes sense to start some kind of blog on the website to explain legal matters in plain words, which startups can share with investors.
Another point to this is that we focus mainly on contracts, which startups use in their operational activity. I think this part is underserved most severely.
We have SAFE, because it is commonly requested by founders, but I think that Clerky does better job on corporate for now, since they have Board Consent+SAFE+signing+storage.
I would be significantly interested in something to help explain legal terms as someone with little experience with business, finance, or law. I'm interested to see how this turns out!
We're currently hiring a SENIOR FULL STACK DEVELOPER/TECHNICAL LEAD to help lawyers work faster, get smarter, and go home early.
CiteRight is a knowledge platform that makes legal organizations smarter by letting users store, find, and reuse the legal research they've already done. Our first product lets lawyers download legal cases from online databases and work with them inside Microsoft Word to generate common legal documents. By helping lawyers do the boring stuff, we generate a lot of useful data that nobody else has. We use the knowledge graph generated by the relationships between users, documents, legal cases, and clients to drive a recommendation engine that automates much of the routine tasks that lawyers and legal information professionals do by hand.
We're hiring an experienced hand to lead our dev team, manage implementations with our enterprise customers, and be a technical leader for CiteRight as we build and sell the leading insight engine for lawyers.
You should have significant experience with our stack (JS, MongoDB, C#, AWS), and you should be comfortable with the responsibility and autonomy involved in taking ownership of a project and seeing it through to a successful conclusion.
Cities pass "bylaws" that affect their municipality. In Canada municipalities are more limited in their lawmaking powers than cities in some other countries.
For example: redrafting a contract is a lot like refactoring code. (Make sure that terms are only defined in one place; consider and account for edge cases; be aware of how changes in one area affect dependencies elsewhere, etc.).
If, like me, you’re allergic to repetitive, time-consuming tasks, coding is a way to potentially make your lawyering job go faster. I know lawyers who’ve used a combination of Python scripts and Zapier steps to fully automate client intake, for example.
HOWEVER! I’m pretty confident that coding will never become a core legal competency. Coding and lawyering are different roles, with different outputs, serving different stakeholders. Instead what’s more likely to happen is that coding will gradually eliminate a whole swath of tasks that we once assumed only lawyers could do — until we realized that those tasks were just algorithms in disguise, and therefore automate-able.
Like most other knowledge workers, lawyers are going to be responsible for managing — and applying wisdom and discernment — to the outputs that algorithms/software generates. And that’s a good thing! It’ll mean that lawyers are doing more of what they do best.