Lawful.ly: Providing Open-Sourced Annotations for Transactional Documents

Today we feature Chris Murphy, co-founder of Lawful.ly  He perfectly articulated what seems to be the catch-22 in the legal startup field. Legal startups are very different from other startup sectors because they really need some basis of legal experience to go off of. At the same time, the old guard with the experience isn't willing, for the most part, to adopt new innovations, while the younger attorneys are open to it, but lack the experience. "The key," Chris says, "is for the young lawyers to correctly pinpoint the problem."

Tell me about yourself.

I went to law school late in life, and was a technical consultant before that. I'm a transactional attorney by day, and Lawful.ly is a side project for now. When I started practicing law, I couldn't help but notice how inefficient it was in many ways.  To an extent, I am or was naive to the legal business, so I'm not steeped so deep in the legal tradition that I'm afraid to ask "it's making money, why would I change it?"  I think that complacency brought on by big profits is what makes the legal industry so ripe for disruption.

How did you come up with the idea for Lawful.ly?

At my company, they didn't pay for general access to Lexis Nexis or Westlaw. Consequently, I was trying to double check on some specific language free online and I found that there is a dearth of legal information--or at least good legal information--on the internet. This didn't make sense to me because anywhere else, we can just go to the web and figure out what our problems are.  You can even use WebMD and similar free sites for medical information, which is also a regulated area. But with law, its so hard to find vetted, approved legal information. Bradley had been running into similar issues, and after a few times talking, we decided we should take a crack at trying to be the ones who fixed this issue.

I've talked to other attorneys since then, and looking from the standpoint of a small law firm or solo attorney, they've told me that they run into this issue regularly.  While they're experts in certain areas of law, it would feel uncomfortable having to dive into another field without resorting to, and being charged for, Lexis Nexis or WestLaw, and there is no other way to obtain this information quickly and easily.  We know that for just about every other industry there are websites where you can look up the collective public wisdom, but there really is nothing like that for the law. 

What's has been your inspiration? 

Bradley and I were huge fans of Docracy, which markets itself as the GitHub for legal documents. Docracy has been great at collecting documents, but we found that I didn't want to go through fifty of them to find a good document.  This is significantly more problematic if you are not an attorney and looking to find a good agreement to use.  I thought there must be a better way to tackle this general problem. 

What problem are you trying to tackle?

In our market research, we found that everyone looks for legal documents on the web, including attorneys. 85% of people with legal problems don't talk to an attorney--only 15% do. I think it must be because of the reputation that the legal profession has made for itself. Bradley and I spend lots of time undoing bad agreements. We wanted to find a find a way to keep laypeople from shooting themselves in the foot with bad contracts from online resources or elsewhere, and to arm them to speak to an attorney. As well, we wanted to provide an affordable, modern resource for attorneys who are looking for specific legal information – something in between the Westlaws and Lexis/Nexis's of the world, but definitely above Listservs and the like which are still constantly used by lawyers. 

So what does Lawful.ly do?

Lawful.ly has curated documents with annotated explanations that allow you to get the info you need on those documents. Each annotation is ideally 3-5 sentences (and no more than one paragraph), and you can link it to something else online which provides greater detail if you like. We're providing legal information in a method thats digestable, vetted, and consumer friendly. We think this is important and even in line with the access to justice movement to make legal information freely available, because we're all affected by the law. We want to simplify information and make it available to the public. People shouldn't have to go to law school or pay $500/hr to educate themselves on the laws that affect them in their everyday lives.

There has been a lot of fear-mongering about some sites likes ours, but we want to be very clear that we're not trying to put lawyers out of business. We are trying to return attorneys to being counselors. Instead paying attorneys hundreds of dollars an hour to ask them "what do I do?", we should have clients that ask us specific, pointed questions instead of coming to us for general education. In that way, I believe attorneys will be providing more value to clients.

Any other similar startups?

A similar startup, CaseText, has the same idea of annotating legal texts, but they are doing that to case law.  I think we have very similar ideas, but focused on solving different problems, or at least problems for different customer segments.  We are supportive of anyone trying to innovate in the legal arena, however, and have found the legal innovation community to be really supportive of just about all ideas and companies.

What was your initial idea?

Lawful.ly is actually pretty close to the initial concept. I had been looking for an explanation on the web for some standard legal language that was being used in a different context, but couldn't find anything helpful without going to one of the legal research services. It was really hard to find anything on the web on the topic at all.  

Generally, I think that standard transactional documents ought to be open-sourced.  However, even with that, there are big gaps between having the document (which you easily find online) and understanding what it means and how it affects you. I found out that its hard to find good legal information unless you want to pay thousands of dollars. Lawful.ly is targeting the community of solo/small firms and end users who wouldn't or couldn't pay that amount anyway.

How are you planning to monetize?

We are still investigating a number of routes to monetize. We're committed to the idea that the access to information must remain free. However, we don't want to make this a non-profit, at least at this stage, since we feel that brings on some burdensome administrative duties and limits certain options and opportunities.

What has been your biggest success?

We've gotten really good responses from the people we talked to about this. Every person we talk to, including most attorneys who are younger and more open, really understand the need. When we talked to people at SXSW they totally got it! It's nice to have an idea where its clear that there's a gap in the market. We've also been able to get a number of attorneys on board. 

How old is Lawful.ly?

We launched our private beta in July 2013. We anticipate moving to a public beta soon, but we want to add a few more features first.

What has been your biggest challenge?

Time and funding. Time because its a side business, and funding because we're bootstrapping it. There are some revenue models out there that we believe will absolutely work, but they requires a certain minimum set of users to prove it out.  We need to be able to get to a certain level of traction on our own funding before we can attract outside investors.

How are you attracting users?

Bradley and I have tried to cultivate a select group for our private beta through social media and our community ties. Bradley is very active in social media, and we're both connected in the local legal community. We wanted 100-200 attorney users, and not just laymen, because we wanted people to provide real feedback. We are intentionally trying not to blow it out yet. We're focused on depth and getting good commentary. We want to be deep, not wide.

Any advice for the aspiring legal entrepreneur?

Do your market research. Always ask, don't just go on a hunch. Hunches are a great way to get started, but you need to verify everything. Ask 50 different people in each of your target markets. I had tried to do another startup in a different area, and one of many lessons I learned is to make sure you're really tackling a pain people have, and not just something you think is a problem. Otherwise, you may end up building something people don't need.

Anything else?

If you start a legal startup, do it in the name of changing the way lawyers provide service so that it enhances the client's experience. This profession has to evolve and there is fantastic opportunity out there. Hopefully we'll be part of it. Change will happen. Successful lawyers in the future will either be part of that change, or at least embrace the change and get pulled along with the tide. If not, they may end up being washed out.

Mootus: Attorney Collaboration and Reinventing Reputation

Today we feature Adam Ziegler, Co-Founder and CEO of Boston-based Mootus and the Boston Legal Innovation Meetup (more on that later). Mootus hosts a citation-based Q&A platform that facilitates the exchange of legal knowledge and expertise, and brings attorney reputation into the 21st century by helping lawyers build an online legal reputation.

Tell us about yourself:

Before law school, I spent two years as a paralegal and office manager in a solo practitioner's office in DC. After graduating from Michigan Law School in 2002, I clerked on the 6th Circuit and interned with the Appellate Staff of the Civil Division of the Department of Justice. Then, I spent a year at Covington and Burling in DC doing environmental insurance litigation and white collar defense work, and then spent 3 years at Goodwin Proctor in Boston doing large-scale commercial litigation and SEC investigations. I really wanted to be in the courtroom and get the experience of being a trial attorney, and I had no interest in becoming a litigation partner who had never tried a case. Since that opportunity wasn't available in a large firm, I left for a small boutique litigation firm named Donnelly, Conroy & Gelhaar. I loved my experience there, spent plenty of time on my feet in court, and become a partner there in early 2011.

And then what happened?

The firm, people and experience were all terrific, but I had an overriding frustration with the unavoidable fact that so much of my work (and that of others) was redundant and ultimately unnecessary. Like all lawyers, I was continually reinventing the wheel and spending an extraordinary amount of time defending against frivolous arguments. I became obsessed with finding a way to collaborate and share knowledge without betraying the core tenets of the legal profession. That frustration and obsession prompted me to pursue Mootus.

Was there any one experience that made the light bulb go off?

One of my favorite clients was a small, non-profit documentary film company that was sued by a big software company. It was a classic David versus Goliath case--the big company had a problem with what my client said on its website and sued for trademark infringement and defamation. My client ultimately prevailed, but during the litigation it made the decision to post the pleadings from the case online to bring some transparency to the dispute. This got a lot of attention. Lots of trademark experts analyzed the case and weighed-in online in favor of my client. This experience opened my eyes to the possibilities of open-source legal knowledge and crowdsourced legal analysis, and I became very focused on figuring out how to harness that kind of activity to help improve the quality and efficiency of legal work.

So tell me a bit more about Mootus.

Mootus is both a marketplace and repository for legal knowledge. Users can pose concise legal queries, and others can respond by citing primary legal authority. It's not an open-ended Q&A platform; we only accept answers in the form of a citation (and an explanatory parenthetical). Once a response is posted, others can vote the response as “on point” or “off base.” The result is a rich thread of legal debate and conversation, as well as a compendium of citations relevant to a given legal issue. We’re providing a new way to put legal knowledge to work and to tap into the expertise and efforts of lawyers. We also make the content openly accessible on the web to give lawyers a better starting point so they don’t have to completely reinvent the wheel when researching a given issue.

How have you dealt with the ethical issues?

We care a great deal about legal ethics, and we’ve done a few key things to promote ethical behavior. First, we’re very explicit in our terms that if you are looking for legal advice, you should leave our site and go hire a lawyer instead (and tell them to use Mootus to reduce the hours spent on unnecessary research). We are not a lawyer lead generation site. Second, we’ve built the site to be interesting and useful mainly to lawyers. We welcome non-lawyers to view and even interact with the content on our site. It’s our view that lawyers should be more transparent, and the public should have more visibility into what lawyers and courts do. But the reality is that most non-lawyers don’t find legal citations or legal analysis very interesting. Third, all of the questions on our site are anonymous, and the answers are presumptively anonymous and private. So a lawyer can use the site without fearing that she will be publicly associated with her activity on the site unless and until she’s ready to take advantage of the reputational benefits of providing high quality responses.  

One concern I've heard from lawyers not in the "legal startup field" is that the startups are trying to get lawyers to do things in ways that the tech community works, but not how the legal community works. How have you addressed this concern?

Mootus is built to be very similar to what lawyers already do. It’s simulated legal argument. Yes, it's online, yes it's open, but at end of the day, its just like writing a piece of a brief and adding a citation and parenthetical to support an argument. It’s just like finding ways to rebut an adversary’s arguments or to distinguish cases cited by the other side. Good law wins. Persuasive arguments attract support. The lawyers we talk to tell us its very natural because it fits their conception of how the law already works.

What has been your biggest challenge?

Our biggest challenge has been getting lawyers comfortable with the basic notion of being content creators online. The rest of the world is used to saying and doing things online, having an identity online, and liking and interacting with one another. Lawyers have been slow to adapt. Although that’s changing in a big way, for many lawyers online activity is still a little weird. It's still new behavior. Fundamentally, Mootus is trying to get lawyers to transition from being passive consumers of online information to interactive producers of information. That’s no small challenge, but we’re confident in our approach.

What's been your biggest success?

It’s too early for us to claim any success. But I’m proud that we've maintained our focus on what makes lawyers valuable and unique. It’s not always fashionable these days, but we are advocates for lawyers, especially good ones who are committed to delivering high quality services efficiently. We're not coming from outside the industry trying to make the case that lawyers are superfluous and easy to replace. We place great value in lawyers, and we want to help them develop better ways to deliver their services to more clients. In keeping with that philosophy, we try to highlight what's great about lawyers and the law--the notion of authority-based argument, legal hierarchy, and the rule of law, to name a few. I'm very happy that we’ve stayed true to that.

What is your great hope for Mootus?

In a perfect world, Mootus will become an integral part of the legal industry. In the process we’ll elevate the quality of legal work, eliminate waste, create new, profitable opportunities for lawyers to put their law degrees to work, and help lower the cost of providing legal services to those who need them. For lots of reasons, I think the legal industry is in the early stages of a fundamental transformation, and I believe Mootus can be a big part of that.  

I've noticed that Mootus specifically targets students. Why is that?

Two reasons. First, generally speaking, new and aspiring lawyers are more comfortable with online activity, so they’re quicker to understand our vision for the future of legal work. Second, we're trying to make it possible for law students and new graduates to get some practice doing what lawyers do--engaging in legal argument and having the experience of rebutting what someone else says--at volume with high repetition. My view is that in law school, law students are taught how to do it, but they’re not given enough opportunity to practice it. When they graduate, it’s too late for “practice,” and instead they must develop this skill where it really matters, with the client’s interests and dollars on the line. Mootus allows students and grads to develop skills in a safer place where there is less pressure and mistakes can be learning opportunities rather than disasters. As they improve, they can use their online reputation (similar to a portfolio on Github) to market themselves to law firms and clients.

For example, we give users a free profile to describe who they are and to give them stats on how they're doing on the site (i.e. how well answers are received, the number of questions they've answered, site ranking), as well as a portfolio of past activity. Profiles are private by default, but users can make them public when they’re ready to use them for marketing purposes. We believe this type of online legal reputation someday could be more informative and influential than law school grades and law school rankings. It’s our goal to empower new lawyers to take control of their legal reputation and to have the ability to improve that reputation over time based solely on the merit of self-directed activity, independent of exam performance, school pedigree and employment status.

Anything you want to pass on to other entrepreneurs?

I’m an unwavering advocate for legal startups, but I strongly believe in having real legal experience on the team to provide insight into product, customers and strategy. I’m not talking about anybody with a JD – I mean somebody who actually practiced law and advised a lot of real clients. It can take many different forms -- founder, employee, advisor, mentor, investor or whatever. I’ve seen companies without that perspective make some really stupid mistakes, and I think companies with a real first-hand understanding of the way the legal industry works will have the most success in changing it. In my view, it’s different from the typical startup perception that you can disrupt entirely from the outside. In the legal industry, you need deep domain expertise, understanding and depth to get it right. It's like medicine--it's difficult to fix without expertise and knowledge about where the problems and opportunities actually exist. We're not building consumer apps that tap into widespread needs and behaviors common to just about everyone. Instead, we’re delivering products and services to a specific group of highly educated professionals with unique obligations, interests, motivations and values. I welcome new lawyers, and anyone else, to the legal entrepreneurship field, but I strongly believe that to succeed your team should include someone who really knows the legal industry from the inside.

And by the way, I think the reverse is true too. For any lawyers or law students out there, don’t think for a second that you can build something that really matters without having professional technical expertise as a core part of your team. I’m fortunate to have a great technical expert, Jeff Schneller, as my co-founder, and without him Mootus would just be another idea rattling around in my head.   

Anything you want to add?

Just that there is an immense amount of opportunity for innovation in the legal field. I think it’s fantastic that more and more startups (and investors) are pursuing the legal industry, and I hope it continues. Don’t get scared by the stereotype of the risk-averse, technophobic lawyer. Be informed about the important ethical constraints that exist in the legal world, but don’t give up on the possibility of doing something original within those constraints. If your first idea doesn’t pan out, stay at it and find something else. There are way more opportunities than there are people willing and able to take them.