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I'm thinking about writing a book: LaTeX for Lawyers

LaTeX is a high-quality document preparation system, and the...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
it would be really cool if u had a bunch of LyX/LaTeX templa...
Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman
  03/08/15
That's the plan. The book would have an accompanying web sit...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
if u can make a bullet-proof implementation, i'm sure it'd b...
Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman
  03/08/15
I use the \LaTeX command in my resume, which formats LaTeX l...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
shrewd
heady sadistic casino
  03/08/15
"For example, clients love receiving elaborate-looking ...
excitant half-breed gas station
  03/08/15
it's pathetic, and so many lawyers outsource the corporation...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
what are the ethical rules for outsourcing this shit? how do...
excitant half-breed gas station
  03/08/15
it likely depends on the jurisdiction as it could raise fee-...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
only a small minority of lawyers need documents with fancy t...
opaque vibrant legal warrant
  03/08/15
latex makes it incredibly easy to streamline and automate re...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
are these similar? http://www.hotdocs.com http://www.con...
racy slap-happy house circlehead
  03/08/15
probably not. they don't talk about the internal representat...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
hot docs is shitty 90's software that's on version 20 or som...
racy slap-happy house circlehead
  03/08/15
there's no need for semantic markup for contracts or a contr...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
those appear to be geared for mass-producing form Ks and wil...
Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman
  03/08/15
(LaTeX MLM schemer)
Cowardly comical gaming laptop
  03/08/15
u could also include pre-packaged clauses i have no idea ...
Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman
  03/08/15
Options tend to kill these concepts from a business perspect...
deep sneaky criminal
  03/08/15
...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  04/09/15
better idea: developing custom, optical character recognitio...
Bespoke Shaky Nibblets
  03/08/15
patents and published apps are all on google patents, breh ...
excitant half-breed gas station
  03/08/15
most new FWs are and you could copy the older ones in the PT...
Bespoke Shaky Nibblets
  03/08/15
for example, you could build reports about the number of met...
Bespoke Shaky Nibblets
  03/08/15
fml. this reminds me of why i hate fucking patents. reading ...
excitant half-breed gas station
  03/08/15
"you could do something similar with discovery response...
Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman
  03/08/15
I've been working on patent-related data mining for a couple...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
Lol, you obviously have very little experience with discover...
Bespoke Shaky Nibblets
  03/08/15
yeah, just a list of form objections you can check off or so...
excitant half-breed gas station
  03/08/15
hot docs does that
racy slap-happy house circlehead
  03/08/15
training a neural net using what data? you need a lot of dat...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
no idea how neural nets work, but there are thousands of dis...
Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman
  03/08/15
wow, I didn't realize it was that many. In that case, deep b...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
being a lawyer at a big firm. christ, there is so much th...
racy slap-happy house circlehead
  03/08/15
Inefficiency definitely is not beneficial for them. Although...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
that's not the model though. biglaw firms, all of them, oper...
racy slap-happy house circlehead
  03/08/15
but it's even better to maximize the number of hours and att...
Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman
  03/08/15
that's almost as bad as people printing out electronic disco...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
you seem like you know shit. are you in a startup or someth...
Bespoke Shaky Nibblets
  03/08/15
I have the time and interest in developing something legit, ...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  04/09/15
any secretary/para/lawyer at a firm would have access to thi...
Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman
  03/08/15
titcr. internal document search is no better than altavista.
racy slap-happy house circlehead
  03/08/15
sometimes i expect the Excite! logo to pop up when i try to ...
Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman
  03/08/15
Westlaw's internal search? it's utter shit.
racy slap-happy house circlehead
  03/08/15
this exists, it's called DeepDive http://deepdive.stanford....
heady sadistic casino
  03/08/15
someone would still need to integrate this into a GUI or som...
Bespoke Shaky Nibblets
  03/08/15
DeepDive is just an expert system on steroids. It's the infe...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  04/09/15
the big problem with everything ITT: this is all stuff that ...
racy slap-happy house circlehead
  03/08/15
if you're more efficient, you can charge more. someone who c...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  03/08/15
unfortunately that's not how law works
racy slap-happy house circlehead
  03/08/15
explain. law firms compete against each other and in the lon...
sexy public bath
  03/08/15
if law is such a competitive business, why are employees pai...
big roommate hall
  04/17/15
because lawyers aren't original
pink razzmatazz heaven
  04/17/15
yeah AKA they stick with what works and aren't competing wit...
big roommate hall
  04/17/15
it's more for solos--they'll buy anything to help them cut c...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  04/17/15
I would bet the average solo is more limited by number of cl...
big roommate hall
  04/17/15
marketing is all about making shit look good, and that's whe...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  04/17/15
Bro no solo is going to spend any time let alone money learn...
big roommate hall
  04/17/15
Yeah, I agree that no one would spend time learning LaTeX co...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  04/17/15
DOA
deep sneaky criminal
  03/08/15
(A. J. Sutter)
Lemon Tanning Salon Therapy
  03/08/15
...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  04/09/15
I made some progress on the book this weekend. Unfortunately...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  04/13/15
...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  04/17/15
Sounds like about as much fun as writing a brief in HTML.
citrine den rigpig
  04/17/15
http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2916
big roommate hall
  04/17/15
Anything ever come of this?
Swollen library
  06/10/16
...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  12/11/16
Currently, I've developed a pretty robust set of command lin...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  09/19/18
make them write elaborate plaintext files like gamefaqs
sinister impressive cruise ship mexican
  06/10/16
...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  12/11/16
...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  12/12/16
uber but for lawyers
clear famous landscape painting
  12/12/16
Intense autism ITT
Hairraiser step-uncle's house
  12/12/16
...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  12/12/16
This is a great new autistic hobby for you.
Learning Disabled Theater Stage
  09/19/18
it's the only way I can actually enjoy the criminal defense/...
pink razzmatazz heaven
  09/19/18
I'm being sincere, you're putting your energies to good use.
Learning Disabled Theater Stage
  09/19/18


Poast new message in this thread



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:01 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

LaTeX is a high-quality document preparation system, and the de facto typesetting standard for scientific publications. http://www.latextemplates.com/cat/articles shows some example templates for general articles, but the same can be done for legal documents.

My book would explain to lawyers how to properly typeset different types of legal documents, including court filings, contracts, wills, letters of engagement, and invoices. It'd also teach lawyers how to use the freely-available tools to collaborate with colleagues and clients in the preparation of documents.

Does this sound interesting to anyone?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451045)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:02 AM
Author: Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman

it would be really cool if u had a bunch of LyX/LaTeX templates that the reader/user could download and use

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451046)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:07 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

That's the plan. The book would have an accompanying web site that provides the templates for free. The target market is solos, and my hope is that they'll contribute their own templates so that everyone can benefit. We do so much repetitive work, so there's no reason not to streamline it.

Even if the typesetting has no legal effect on the document (besides compliance with the jurisdiction's formatting rules), clients love to see something that looks nice. For example, clients love receiving elaborate-looking stock certificates for their newly-formed corporations.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451056)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:13 AM
Author: Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman

if u can make a bullet-proof implementation, i'm sure it'd be marketable

lawyers hate dealing with TOCs and all that stuff, and the rendering on TeX is simply beautiful

i have only ever met two lawyers IRL who were aware of TeX, and they both commented immediately during my interviews on it (my resume was rendered in LaTeX)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451068)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:17 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

I use the \LaTeX command in my resume, which formats LaTeX like this: http://latex-project.org/lib/img/latex.png

in addition to looking cool, it immediately conveys that the resume was written in LaTeX

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451075)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 10:57 PM
Author: heady sadistic casino

shrewd

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27454873)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:20 AM
Author: excitant half-breed gas station

"For example, clients love receiving elaborate-looking stock certificates for their newly-formed corporations."

lol @ the lies + fraud that is forming a bidness

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451082)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:25 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

it's pathetic, and so many lawyers outsource the corporation formation aspect of their business to the firms that provide those registered agent + certificate of incorporation filing services for like $300 only because those services provide tangible, professional-looking documents.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451093)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:28 AM
Author: excitant half-breed gas station

what are the ethical rules for outsourcing this shit? how do they get away with it?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451097)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:34 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

it likely depends on the jurisdiction as it could raise fee-splitting concerns

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451111)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:09 AM
Author: opaque vibrant legal warrant

only a small minority of lawyers need documents with fancy typesetting

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451060)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:21 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

latex makes it incredibly easy to streamline and automate repetitive aspects of document preparation. it also facilitates the commenting/review process, because it's just a text file: if you use git, svn, or some other version control system, you can avoid painful accept changes battles by branching off of the original copy and making your own. i don't expect boomer partners to ever understand that aspect, but for most tech-literate people, this process is highly intuitive.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451088)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:10 AM
Author: racy slap-happy house circlehead

are these similar?

http://www.hotdocs.com

http://www.contractual.ly

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451061)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:13 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

probably not. they don't talk about the internal representation of documents, but i imagine it isn't TeX-based.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451070)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:20 AM
Author: racy slap-happy house circlehead

hot docs is shitty 90's software that's on version 20 or something, but as far as i know it's the standard for small firm document generation. WealthCounsel's stuff is based on it, for example.

contractual.ly is interesting but it looks like, after launching as a document generation startup aimed at lawyers, they are now focused on contracts for procurement depts.

i've been posting for a couple years now that there should be semantic markup for contracts and a contract-specific text editor that isn't Word.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451085)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:33 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

there's no need for semantic markup for contracts or a contract-specific text editor, because something better already exists: LaTeX. Everything in LaTeX is a command, so you can automate every sort of clause you can imagine.

I'd personally store every standard contract clause in a document store (like mongodb or something) and then have a script generate the LaTeX based on the information in the database. It's also a good approach to cataloging issues and holdings to facilitate writing memos, briefs, and motions, but that's getting more to firm management software (which needs to be improved).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451107)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:19 AM
Author: Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman

those appear to be geared for mass-producing form Ks and wills by swapping dates, names, etc. as variables within the docs

the OP's proposal overlaps a bit with this but appears to be targeted toward typesetting which is more of a formatting issue

but because TeX is so customizable (and resembles computer code, iirc) it would probably be easy to grab the data and have google pull all ur published case cites etc. or to otherwise parse it and do useful things with it

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451078)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:20 AM
Author: Cowardly comical gaming laptop

(LaTeX MLM schemer)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451083)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:26 AM
Author: Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman

u could also include pre-packaged clauses

i have no idea if this is actually useful from a corporate lawyer perspective but it would be kinda cool to have libraries of indemnity clauses or wutever and just insert them

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451095)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 5:55 AM
Author: deep sneaky criminal

Options tend to kill these concepts from a business perspective. Even supposedly discriminating lawyers just want a script because save for the drunkard crowed, convenience and assembly line access will always serve free time away from thinking about your horseshit career. Automation is the future of law and it's barely being scratched. In 20 years shit like this will be viewed as the AOL chatroom phase of the whole process.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451235)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 9th, 2015 8:12 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27655951)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:28 AM
Author: Bespoke Shaky Nibblets

better idea: developing custom, optical character recognition software for extracting information from patents, patent file histories, etc. and creating a searchable database that is searchable using a huge number of potential attributes. you could interface with Microsoft Word to automatically generate infringement or invalidity charts.

you could do something similar with discovery responses: feed a template into your customized OCR software, then feed it the incoming discovery request and use something like a neural net to generate a rough draft of the responses (which are always canned and essentially the same for every client/partner pairing)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451100)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:29 AM
Author: excitant half-breed gas station

patents and published apps are all on google patents, breh

FWs are not

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451101)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:31 AM
Author: Bespoke Shaky Nibblets

most new FWs are and you could copy the older ones in the PTO. the value is in the extraction of relevant data and searchability. google patents only let's you search on a few very limited fields that provide less value if you're developing an invalidity search, for example

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451103)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:33 AM
Author: Bespoke Shaky Nibblets

for example, you could build reports about the number of method vs. apparatus vs. other claims, number of independent/dependent claims, similarity of figures or portions of specs to figures or portions of specs in other patents (patent prosecutors copy pasta shit from other patents all the time)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451109)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:47 AM
Author: excitant half-breed gas station

fml. this reminds me of why i hate fucking patents. reading about this shit makes me want to jump out my window.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451139)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:31 AM
Author: Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman

"you could do something similar with discovery responses: feed a template into your customized OCR software, then feed it the incoming discovery request and use something like a neural net to generate a rough draft of the responses (which are always canned and essentially the same for every client/partner pairing)"

welp there goes the biglaw business model



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451104)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:45 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

I've been working on patent-related data mining for a couple years now. Trust me: the USPTO doesn't make it easy at all. They have about 50 different machine-readable formats in which they publish documents, but sometime in 2001, they moved to XML. The pre-XML patents use an extremely cryptic format defined in their Green Book: http://storage.googleapis.com/patents/docs/PatentFullTextAPSDoc_GreenBook.pdf -- it's an absolute nightmare. Even the patents in XML format are a challenge, because the field names often change without remaining backwards-compatible with earlier versions. Fuck the government.

Automating responses to discovery requests is even harder, because there's no machine learning approach that's good enough to approximate the human mind in the manner you suggest. Because there aren't enough examples of request-response pairings, you'd need an algorithm that understands the language, rather than finding patterns in the requests that yield particular responses. But stuff like document review can be automated using semi-supervised techniques that require an expert to tag some documents and then evaluate the algorithm's performance as it iteratively adapts.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451135)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:53 AM
Author: Bespoke Shaky Nibblets

Lol, you obviously have very little experience with discovery requests/responses. Almost every single fucking one of these is a copy pasta fuckfest, and when I draft them I literally act out the algorithm I have in mind using Microsoft Word's clipboard functionality. Also, I'm not even suggesting full automation (which, as you say, is probably impossible). What I'm suggesting is spending10-15 minutes training a neural net and then letting it do what it do instead of billing 8 hours doing the exact same fucking thing.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451153)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:55 AM
Author: excitant half-breed gas station

yeah, just a list of form objections you can check off or something.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451155)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 5:15 AM
Author: racy slap-happy house circlehead

hot docs does that

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451184)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 4:56 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

training a neural net using what data? you need a lot of data for neural nets to perform well. something like sparse group lasso might perform better in this particular domain, but to be honest, i'm not sure.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451157)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 5:07 AM
Author: Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman

no idea how neural nets work, but there are thousands of discovery responses on our shared drive

probably more like tens of thousand if not more

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451170)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 5:20 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

wow, I didn't realize it was that many. In that case, deep belief networks using stacked restricted boltzmann machines will likely offer the best results. I'd love to get access to that type of data -- what's the best source?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451189)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 5:21 AM
Author: racy slap-happy house circlehead

being a lawyer at a big firm.

christ, there is so much that could be done if biglaw hired software engineers. inefficiency is to their benefit though.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451192)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 5:36 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

Inefficiency definitely is not beneficial for them. Although increased efficiency means fewer billed hours, it also means fewer attorneys are needed.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451213)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 5:42 AM
Author: racy slap-happy house circlehead

that's not the model though. biglaw firms, all of them, operate based on leveraging the difference between associate salaries and the hours they bill. a big firm would love nothing more than a case with massive discovery or a deal with massive amounts of diligence. this is high margin work for the partners. they are maximizing for # of attorneys needed.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451221)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 5:44 AM
Author: Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman

but it's even better to maximize the number of hours and attorneys at all times

one time i did a doc production w/an outside vendor. i wanted the vendor to separate thousands of files depending on their filename pre-fix. the vendor finally finished after 14 hours. i later learned that the vendor had been DRAGGING AND DROPPING INDIVIDUAL FILES, one by one, for that entire time. even tho they could have just done a find ./ -name "prefix*" -exec mv (or whatever the reg expression would be).

nobody complained about the bill even tho it was ludicrous

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451223)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 6:06 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

that's almost as bad as people printing out electronic discovery and producing the physical copy so that the other side has to OCR it. that shit doesn't fly anymore, though.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451240)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 11:13 PM
Author: Bespoke Shaky Nibblets

you seem like you know shit. are you in a startup or something? do you have time/interest in developing something legit, like i've described?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27454969)



Reply Favorite

Date: April 9th, 2015 8:15 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

I have the time and interest in developing something legit, like you've described. I'm just finishing up a master's in computer science, but I'm also a lawyer. Hit me up at my throwaway: moshe.blumstein@gmail.com

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27655958)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 5:33 AM
Author: Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman

any secretary/para/lawyer at a firm would have access to this stuff

but, it's almost all confidential WP and the system might complain if u were to pull it all at once

perhaps u could mine the data if u were brought in as an inhouse consultant

but keep in mind that most biglaw firms don't have efficient ways to search for their prior work product, leading to crazy situations: i.e. rather than digging out a memo that already was answered, there is every incentive to get some associate to re-research the issue and rewrite it from scratch

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451206)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 5:43 AM
Author: racy slap-happy house circlehead

titcr. internal document search is no better than altavista.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451222)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 5:46 AM
Author: Hateful Ivory Space Skinny Woman

sometimes i expect the Excite! logo to pop up when i try to run an internal search

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451226)



Reply Favorite

Date: March 8th, 2015 6:05 AM
Author: racy slap-happy house circlehead

Westlaw's internal search? it's utter shit.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451239)



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Date: March 8th, 2015 10:58 PM
Author: heady sadistic casino

this exists, it's called DeepDive

http://deepdive.stanford.edu/

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27454887)



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Date: March 8th, 2015 11:08 PM
Author: Bespoke Shaky Nibblets

someone would still need to integrate this into a GUI or something that is lawyer-friendly

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27454934)



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Date: April 9th, 2015 8:20 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

DeepDive is just an expert system on steroids. It's the inference rules that make the system unworkable with sufficiently heterogeneous documents.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27655971)



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Date: March 8th, 2015 4:43 AM
Author: racy slap-happy house circlehead

the big problem with everything ITT: this is all stuff that makes lawyers more efficient. as long as the billable hour is the standard, this is all shit that law firms do not want. this would make them lose money. programmers are always geared towards efficiency and ease of use. that's the exact opposite of what benefits lawyers.

the only place where efficient software is welcome is to handle non-billable stuff like firm management, and for contingency fee cases.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451134)



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Date: March 8th, 2015 4:47 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

if you're more efficient, you can charge more. someone who charges $100/hour may be able to complete a task in five hours, while someone charging $500/hour may be able to complete it in one.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451142)



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Date: March 8th, 2015 5:14 AM
Author: racy slap-happy house circlehead

unfortunately that's not how law works

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451181)



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Date: March 8th, 2015 8:31 AM
Author: sexy public bath

explain. law firms compete against each other and in the long run clients are going to favor a more efficient law firm over a less efficient one

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451297)



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Date: April 17th, 2015 7:29 PM
Author: big roommate hall

if law is such a competitive business, why are employees paid lock-step standardized salaries across a hundred firms?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27709868)



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Date: April 17th, 2015 7:31 PM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

because lawyers aren't original

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27709877)



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Date: April 17th, 2015 7:37 PM
Author: big roommate hall

yeah AKA they stick with what works and aren't competing with one another/trying to squeeze out any wacky efficiency other than making associates grind their asses off, so don't bother with this SPS idea.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27709903)



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Date: April 17th, 2015 7:41 PM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

it's more for solos--they'll buy anything to help them cut costs & increase efficiency

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27709927)



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Date: April 17th, 2015 7:43 PM
Author: big roommate hall

I would bet the average solo is more limited by number of clients than inefficiencies in their workflow. Solve their marketing problems first. That's real money. Leads have a pretty tangible value and people will pay.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27709940)



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Date: April 17th, 2015 7:45 PM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

marketing is all about making shit look good, and that's where LaTeX excels

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27709950)



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Date: April 17th, 2015 7:53 PM
Author: big roommate hall

Bro no solo is going to spend any time let alone money learning LaTeX macros and shit to automate a few mundane but not critical business tasks in a way that may look slightly better. Personally, I'd think it was weird and non-standard to see LaTeX-formatted business documents. I don't want a creative lawyer.

You're solving a problem they don't have. This is typical when tech doods or aspies think of how to apply technology to a business because they don't understand the pain points. Ask any solo what keeps them up at night or prevents them from scaling their business. It's all about getting clients in the door to spend $500 on real estate paperwork or handle some small insurance matter. The next biggest thing blocking scale is simply how much time it takes to correspond with clients, meetings, phone calls, etc. Physically typing and formatting documents is not the problem (yet).

Automate getting clients and replace their expensive secretary with Siri and you might get them to that point.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27709992)



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Date: April 17th, 2015 8:37 PM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

Yeah, I agree that no one would spend time learning LaTeX commands, but I imagine most people would have no qualms with learning markdown ( https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ ) and using scripts that convert it to LaTeX. The real value is in collaboratively editing a document without getting into those awful track changes battles.

Automating law firms is pretty much my goal; there's no justification for most of the profession's absurdities beyond risk mitigation and making a comma someone else's nightmare.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27710187)



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Date: March 8th, 2015 5:49 AM
Author: deep sneaky criminal

DOA

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451229)



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Date: March 8th, 2015 9:22 AM
Author: Lemon Tanning Salon Therapy

(A. J. Sutter)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27451320)



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Date: April 9th, 2015 9:57 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27656285)



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Date: April 13th, 2015 8:13 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

I made some progress on the book this weekend. Unfortunately, it's going to take a long time to get this thing off the ground, given everything else I'm working on.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27681034)



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Date: April 17th, 2015 7:13 PM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27709782)



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Date: April 17th, 2015 7:39 PM
Author: citrine den rigpig

Sounds like about as much fun as writing a brief in HTML.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27709919)



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Date: April 17th, 2015 7:44 PM
Author: big roommate hall

http://www.jerf.org/iri/post/2916

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#27709946)



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Date: June 10th, 2016 12:53 PM
Author: Swollen library

Anything ever come of this?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#30668031)



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Date: December 11th, 2016 7:06 PM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#32114017)



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Date: September 19th, 2018 7:28 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

Currently, I've developed a pretty robust set of command line tools, which I actively use to draft legal documents and pleadings. After the initial consultation with a client, I run a program that generates the retainer agreement (with payment schedule) and initial pleadings, and creates the calendar entries for important deadlines. I just switched over to LawPay from Square, so I don't have automated invoicing just yet (it will only take a day or two to develop).

I've put considerably more effort into the creation of a massive database for all of my research (reference materials that I scan at the library, motions that colleagues have sent me, etc.). The database has become pretty massive, and I'm currently considering a dedicated text search engine for it rather than relying on postgresql's full text searching. Sphinx, for example, provides pretty awesome advanced text matching operators (phrase matching, proximity matching, strict order matching, sentence matching, paragraph matching, etc.) that will let me retrieve documents using the familiar Westlaw/Lexis boolean search operators (e.g., "prestigious w/s (law w/2 (school | center))").

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#36838791)



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Date: June 10th, 2016 12:55 PM
Author: sinister impressive cruise ship mexican

make them write elaborate plaintext files like gamefaqs

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#30668044)



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Date: December 11th, 2016 7:27 PM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#32114146)



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Date: December 12th, 2016 5:33 PM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#32122300)



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Date: December 12th, 2016 5:35 PM
Author: clear famous landscape painting

uber but for lawyers

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#32122312)



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Date: December 12th, 2016 5:36 PM
Author: Hairraiser step-uncle's house

Intense autism ITT

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#32122329)



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Date: December 12th, 2016 5:49 PM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven



(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#32122438)



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Date: September 19th, 2018 7:40 AM
Author: Learning Disabled Theater Stage

This is a great new autistic hobby for you.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#36838820)



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Date: September 19th, 2018 7:42 AM
Author: pink razzmatazz heaven

it's the only way I can actually enjoy the criminal defense/family law grind

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#36838827)



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Date: September 19th, 2018 7:43 AM
Author: Learning Disabled Theater Stage

I'm being sincere, you're putting your energies to good use.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=2825093&forum_id=2#36838828)