Thread

1. dabinat · 1790566087 · focus · HN ↗

   My experience with lawyers is that if you need a legal document, they often have templates ready to go and will take 10 seconds to find & replace your company name into the document. I know this because they often don’t proofread it afterwards. They then charge you $1000 for that 10 seconds of work. Given that I have felt ripped off by many lawyers, I’m totally fine with that industry getting disrupted.

   1. tiffanyh · 1790570116 · focus · HN ↗

      Do you have any issues with thr tech industry selling software licenses?

      Because a lawyer selling a contract template, is in many ways, very similar in concept to tech industry selling a software license/seat.

      They are both akin to “templates”, and selling IP.

      1. sa46 · 1790571388 · focus · HN ↗

         The difference is that lawyers typically charge by the hour. Software is not sold based on how long it took to create.

         So, if a lawyer bills $1000 for "10 seconds of work", it smells fraudulent.

         If $1000 was a flat rate, then it's similar to software: you're purchasing some IP and passing off legal liability to the lawyer. How long the lawyer spent on it doesn't matter.

         1. gspr · 1790580423 · focus · HN ↗

            In the lawyer's case one might argue that it's just a time quantization inaccuracy. There's no smaller unit of time than an hour for them.

            One can argue that there should be, but billing in 10 second increments might also be a bit much to ask.

            One would hope that they would at least aggregate multiple smaller-than-resolution time blocks into one before billing though. (Five documents over the course of a week ends up costing the same)

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