igurari

You're correct that Rayiner's statement that Westlaw/Lexis don't charge for access to case law is wrong. But he is right about the broader point that they do provide some value-add, and that value-add is why people continue to use their service.

With the entry of Google Scholar, the access and value-add businesses are divorced. The cost of the underlying access has reached zero. But the reason Westlaw and Lexis are still huge is because they do provide value-adds.

So this talk of opening up PACER is really missing the broader access point - the opinion access problem is largely solved via Google Scholar. PACER documents may be opened up, but they are not useful to lawyers in anything other than some basic docket scenarios.

San Francisco (SOMA), CA - Full-time Engineer and Full-time Designer

Judicata - http://www.judicata.com

We are mapping the legal genome. Using data mining, semantic analysis, machine learning and human computer interface technologies, we are extracting deep meaning from legal documents and creating the most powerful litigation tools in the world. We're a team of 7. We develop in Python, Django, JavaScript and Java. And we've raised $2 million from Peter Thiel, Keith Rabois and SV Angel (David Lee) - all former lawyers.

We are seeking an engineer and a designer. Engineering Requirements: 3+ years of experience. B.S. / B.A. in Computer Science. Strong interest in U.S. law. Design Requirements: 2+ years of experience. Portfolio demonstrating clean, information rich UI designs.

Contact us if you are interested: careers@judicata.com

I think your broader market points are generally correct. And I'd add that amongst younger lawyers the expectation of technology is that it should be well designed, pleasant and smart. Unfortunately, most legal technologies don't stand up to these criteria.

That said, Blake's broader point about the difficulty of the problem still stands, and we think the difficulty - not market trends - is why no one has done this yet. There is much technology and infrastructure that makes what we are doing significantly easier today than it was even 5 years ago. But underlying it all is still a lot of difficult technology that takes years to build.

:-)

Those are valid points, and I've seen it from both sides - as a lawyer and as a businessperson. But one of the things missing from your comment is that good lawyers are protecting their clients from the possibility of things going wrong in the future.

Contracts are often unclear and are often broken. Sometimes things just don't work out. Regardless of how, litigation often ensues. That's when the value of a lawyer becomes apparent. It's easy to complain about lawyers during the negotiation - they often needlessly inject themselves into the process - but it would be worth considering that a good lawyer is trying to protect you in case things go wrong. Look at the Frank McCourt case for an example of where the lawyering was poor and it had a disastrous impact: http://www.minnlawyer.com/jdr/2010/09/17/legal-malpractice-c...

Naive is a particularly strong word here. What part do you think is naive? Thiel is talking about both a 20-50 year vision and a 1000-year vision, and he is pretty non-committal about the 1000-year vision. And I don't think his 20-50 year vision is clearly wrong or naive. Rather - as a lawyer and as an engineer - I actually agree with it.

US law is supposed to be an axiomatic rule based system, but it is not consistent or complete, and in practice it ends up looking sort of arbitrary. But I don't think this means it is naive to assume that automation will make the system more consistent, or that it will help to simplify much of the complexity.

I am not suggesting that law will not always have some complexity and fuzziness - in fact I think it will - but I don't hear Thiel as explicitly saying the opposite - that we will ever get to a point where there is no complexity or fuzziness.

Correct - and that is why I think that automation will not get us all the way there. (At least not in the 20-50 year range; I have no idea what the world will look like in 1000 years.)

And I think your point suggests that lawyers will continue to be valuable for many years to come, as well. There are so many rules that can be applied in a given case - including seemingly contradictory ones - that there is room for reasonable disagreement about which rule should be applied. A skillful lawyer can make a compelling (but not obvious) argument that rule A should be applied and not rule B.

I think this is a very good point, and I totally agree about the importance of emotion and the appearance of justice in our legal system. But I'm not sure it follows that the appearance of justice is at odds with getting things right. A better system would get things right and feel like a fair system to the participants.

My personal opinion is that you can get both with a more transparent system. In theory, a transparent system would drive consistency, and consistent outcomes would hopefully converge around correct outcomes.

We have not published much about what we are doing, so I don't have an available link. I would be happy to discuss it on a one-to-one basis over email, though: itai at our domain.

I think you are both right to a large extent, and the distinction is whether you are focused on the easy cases, the hard cases, or some point in between.

The repetitiveness in the common law is a massive feature and precedent does make the majority of cases quite predictable. And the outcomes of most cases are very principled - just not always with the hardest cases.

The limitation, though, is in knowing whether the facts push a case in one direction or another. Quality lawyering makes a huge difference there, and it is the lawyer's skill that enables her to figure out how to interpret and shape the facts.

As both of you have essentially noted, there are a potentially infinite number of fact patterns, but a finite set of legal rules, so any system must apply an existing law to a new set of facts from time to time. Whether that is viewed as applying an existing law or creating a new law is in the eye of the beholder, and legislators and judges disagree about that all the time. And whether that is a bug or a feature, is a deeper philosophical question that doesn't get at what an expert system can/will do.

I think the only way you'll get a truly effective expert system for the law is if the software is integrated with the people making the law - the legislatures and the judges. I'm doubtful that will happen. In part, that is because I am doubtful that computer systems will ever be able to decide cases in a way that seems independent, fair and humane to the ones being judged.

Short of that, my own startup (judicata.com) is working on mapping the legal genome so that we can identify the core legal rules, and how they are applied to different fact patterns. We think we can make big strides with legal technology in the coming years. It's not an Apollo level undertaking, but it's a pretty massive undertaking nonetheless. We're hoping that a systematic approach at understanding the law at a deep level of detail will allow us to make some of what has been discussed here a reality.

These are very good points. Computer assisted legal analysis would be a big win in terms of cost, efficiency and accuracy. And it would allow lawyers to spend more of their time being productive in highly creative and impactful ways.

For example, if a lawyer knows which arguments have the highest probability of success, she can focus on framing the facts of her case in the way that best supports those arguments. A system that does this would not replace lawyers - but would assist them in some very important tasks - and would be a big step forward.

I also believe these technologies are inevitable, and (plug) at http://www.judicata.com we are working to make that vision a reality.

San Francisco (SOMA), CA - Full-time Engineers and Lawyers

Amicus Labs - http://www.amicuslabs.com/careers

We are mapping the legal genome. Using data mining, semantic analysis, machine learning and human computer interface technologies, we are extracting deep meaning from legal documents and creating the most powerful litigation tools in the world. We are developing in Python, Django, JavaScript, and Java.

We are seeking both engineers with a strong interest in the law and lawyers with a background in programming.

Requirements for engineers: 2+ years of experience. B.S. / B.A. in Computer Science or equivalent experience. Strong interest in U.S. law.

Requirements for lawyers: 2+ years in litigation. J.D. from a top 15 law school. B.S. / B.A. in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Contact us if you are interested: careers@amicuslabs.com

San Francisco (SOMA), CA - Full-time Engineers and Lawyers

Amicus Labs - http://www.amicuslabs.com

We are mapping the legal genome. Using data mining, semantic analysis, machine learning and human computer interface technologies, we are extracting deep meaning from legal documents and creating the most powerful litigation tools in the world.

We are seeking both engineers with a strong interest in the law and lawyers with a background in programming.

Requirements for engineers: 3+ years of experience developing in Python, Django, and JavaScript (Java a plus). B.S. / B.A. in Computer Science or equivalent experience. Strong interest in U.S. law.

Requirements for lawyers: 2+ years in civil litigation. J.D. from a top 10 law school. B.S. / B.A. in Computer Science or equivalent experience.

Contact me if you are interested: itai@amicuslabs.com

You might want to consider another name in light of the Google Vault product: http://www.google.com/enterprise/apps/business/products.html...

Thanks. Makes sense. I was curious because I've spent much time developing quality case parsing and semantic analysis technologies, and one of the very difficult problems I've been interested in - but not yet approached - is automatically parsing and analyzing legislation. I think there is much headway that will be made there in the coming years/decade, but it's a tricky problem.

Do you have a little more information about that? I'm curious to know how the software would do that, and how sophisticated it is. I would imagine it is simply based on user input representations of the bills, and fairly simple tests, but even that would be difficult to do accurately/effectively.

I agree that West/Lexis will still be very lucrative and continue to rule the legal research space for many years to come. I also agree that they add much value (despite competing with them, I have come to appreciate a lot of the things they do to add value). However, their operating profit margins will likely drop from the 25-30% where they now stand.

I am a lawyer and programmer. I put together a site - www.tracelaw.com - which I launched last week. Almost every innovation that I came up with, Google has put into Google Scholar. There is one key technical aspect where what I have done is better, but aside from that, I would say Google Scholar largely does everything extremely well.

I was not saying in my above comment that Google will replace Lexis/Westlaw. What I am suggesting is that they will change how lawyers perform legal research. What this does is separate case search from case hosting. And case search is the really expensive part. Basically, as I see it, lawyers will start their searches on Google, and eventually migrate to Lexis/Westlaw when they've narrowed their focus, or run into a dead end. And if that happens, all those searches that migrated to Google, are searches that are no longer run on Lexis or Westlaw (and for which they can no longer charge a fee).

That is very true. The value in this is for lawyers; lay people have always had a hard time finding and understanding the law. This may help a lay person, but Google's implementation appears to really be focused on lawyers.

This is a huge deal. Having worked in this space for 1.5 years, I can say definitively that Google's ranking algorithm works extremely well. Their UI is solid, though it has room for improvement. They tackled a number of other huge problems relating to document formats (pdf's, footnotes, etc.), and citation formats. In any event, this is most definitely a game changer, and I am sure Lexis and Westlaw will see an immediate hit to revenue in 2010.

Contrary to what most people here have said, I believe there is a use for such a service. However you would have to focus on a niche. Lawyers time their tasks - they bill by increments as short as 6 minutes. To be useful for lawyers you would have to add more features. A few that come to mind would be having multiple connected timers (starting one stops whatever other one is running), labels associated with the timers, notes associated with the timers, and a whole lot of security. Current timer solutions for lawyers are all desktop applications, so a web based solution could be interesting.

PACER records are public, even that they cost money to access. So are most of the records on Lexis and Westlaw. Westlaw has tried to claim a copyright in certain annotations on the court documents, but they have no copyright in the text of the court records themselves.[1]

[1] Matthew Bender & Co. v. West Publishing Co., 158 F.3d 693 (2d Cir. 1998) - http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/158/158.F3d.693.97-...

I don't think I am discounting how much of a difference it makes. My point is simply that without the 1 million documents Malamud handed over, the tool would be largely useless for many months if not years. What Recap does is make Malamud's documents accessible to lawyers (they are presently stuck in massive tar files at bulk.resource.org), and the combined efforts of Malamud and the Recap people, nicely complement each other.

It's clever, but we'll have to wait and see how much it actually adds to the collection of documents freely available. The bulk of the Recap repository was seeded with documents Malamud collected. Of course, Recap appears to be a nice way to actually interact with that collection.

An alternative to placing site guidelines on a welcome page or in the navigation header (where I believe they would eventually be glossed over) would be to link to the guidelines from within inappropriate comments. If a comment gets downmodded below a certain level, it could either be appended with a link to the site guidelines or altogether replaced by a link to the guidelines. This would probably be a better hint to the commenter that something he/she said may have violated the guidelines. This may also have the side effect of keeping people from abusing the downmod option.

This could be one approach to dealing with the "broken windows" issue: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=373356

I have yet to do this, but if I end up working with my friend, it will likely only be under such a structure. Although it requires a more detailed and explicit contract up front, so long as the benchmarks, time frame, and price are reasonable and agreed upon, neither person should have any reason to complain.

The point is that both I and my friend/co-founder will know what we own and what we have to do, and we should both feel reasonably good about it. I won't feel like I've given anything away, and he will probably feel like he got a fair deal.

If he agrees at the outset and meets all the (negotiated) benchmarks, he will have a legal right to enforce the transfer to the joint company. If he refuses to structure the deal that way, then I will probably interpret his refusal as a sign that he is unfit for the job and possibly even untrustworthy.

I am presently in a very similar situation. One possibile solution suggested to me by a lawyer friend would be to set up two companies: one jointly owned by you and your friend, and the other owned solely by yourself.

Your company would own the code you produced to date and then license it out to the jointly owned company. You could then build in an agreement where the jointly owned company has the right to purchase the code for a nominal sum at some future date if certain benchmarks are met.

This should give you the flexibility and protection you seem to want. You could agree to move forward with your friend as a business partner, but if he turns out to be a flop, you still have ownership over your code. At the same time, your partner should feel confident that if he performs his part, he won't be shortchanged.

As for the appropriate percentages, I am also currently grappling with this issue. I haven't settled on a figure yet, although I recall reading somewhere that the best deals are where both parties feel shortchanged.