ChatGTP holds excellent potential for increasing access to justice and the legal system. When I asked ChatGTP 3.5 what its impact on the delivery of legal services and legal access, it reported: “Access to justice: ChatGTP can improve access to justice by making legal information more accessible to the general public. By providing information on legal rights and obligations, ChatGTP can help individuals better understand their legal situation and make informed decisions.” So I decided to test it on topics related to my online law practice at www.mdfamilylawyer.com. Starting about a month ago ..read more

The Justice Technology Association is a new non-profit trade association composed of legal tech entrepreneurs, consumers, policymakers, and investors created to advocate for using legal technology to close the justice gap. It is estimated that approximately 75% of the U.S. population cannot afford lawyer fees and do not have adequate access to the legal system. While bar associations attempt to close the justice gap through pro bono programs and other approaches to providing access to the legal system by consumers and small businesses, the business model for most law firms that serve consumer ..read more

You can create a Prenuptial Agreement at Hello Prenup without incurring high legal fees. It is another “pure play” law product website. It was brought to my attention when the co-founders, Julia Rodgers, a family attorney based in Boston, and Sarabeth Jaffe, a software engineer based in Seattle, pitched Hello Prenup on Shark Tank last month and secured an investment of $150,000 for 30%, despite having relatively low revenues. I thought this would be a good case study for future law product makers. It is a good example of a law product start-up that is directed at consumers. Two of the sharks ..read more

SixFifty Technologies LLC. is a relatively new entrant into the automated legal forms marketplace focusing on providing automated employment legal forms and policies to corporations that range in size from 50 employees to 1,000 and larger. Examples of employment law firms include state-specific employment contracts, employment manuals, independent contractor agreements, privacy solutions, and return to work policies. The company is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, P.C. probably the leading law firm in Silicon Valley and one of the top law firms in the world ..read more

Gabriel Teninbaum has written a new how-to manual on how to productize legal work, which should be required reading by lawyers and others who are thinking about undertaking a productization of legal services project.  See Productizing Legal Work: Providing Legal Expertise at Scale. Teninbaum is the Assistant Dean of Innovation, Strategic Initiatives, & Distance Education at Suffolk University Law School, where he also teaches courses on law and technology to law students, Unlike more theoretical works, like Richard Susskind’s The End of Lawyers, which identifies broad trends in the e ..read more

You have an idea – maybe already implemented – for an interactive software application that helps someone accomplish a legal task.  You’d like to make it available to others. Which platform should be used for delivery? What’s the best way to deliver the application to the target market? Maybe you’re a public-interest-oriented sort who wants to help folks who can’t afford lawyers deal with legal issues. Or maybe you’re an entrepreneurial associate at a firm that wants to open up a side income stream by productizing some of your expertise.  What tools should you use? One of the first ..read more

Estate Planning, traditionally the domain of the legal profession, is about to be disrupted by another new entrant, Vanilla. The company seeks to enable financial planners to offer estate planning services and documents to their clients through a network of attorneys. To be clear, by “disrupted”,  I mean the offering of a comprehensive estate planning service, that includes estate planning documents, at a price that is substantially less than the fees charged by estate planning lawyers. New entrants such as LegalZoom, RocketLawyer, TrustandWill, Nolo.com, and Willing, have long threatene ..read more

Start With the Appropriate Entity Before starting your journey towards creating a law product or automated legal service, an initial decision you must make is the kind of entity that owns, develops, and licenses the digital application. The choice of the operating entity is the first decision you must make when deciding the develop a softwasre applicationfor use by your law firm.  This blog post is primarily for lawyers or law firms thinking about developing a legal product or offering an automated legal service. Definitions First, let’s review some basics. Digital applications are not “s ..read more

Marc Andreessen quipped in 2011: “Software is eating the world”. The idea of software substitutes for lawyers’ work is a radical idea for some lawyers. The legal profession is not immune from this development. Law has a high information component. In a large sense, law is information or as Bill Palin, the young lawyer who won the ABA’s Legal Hackathon at last year’s ABA Annual Meeting, says, “Law is Code”. We are already seeing how Andreesen’s prediction is working its way through the legal profession. If you want to learn more about an impending tsunami of legal disruption, read John O. McGin ..read more

Recently, there has been much discussion of the idea of “productized legal services” as the next transformational strategy that will enable lawyers to make money while they sleep, increase the volume of potential clients, and move away from the tyranny of the billable hour. Some law firms have developed a product approach as a method of capturing potential clients and then upselling them to more traditional legal services. (See, for example https://www.cooleygo.com/). Other law firms have created law products to create additional revenue streams. (See https://afterpattern.com/siskind-susser ..read more