A lawyer friend of mine told me his firm doesn't use software to check all the "hereafter referred to" are bound to their template and vice-versa. They instead have to print the document and go through it with a highlighter.
The firm charges their clients on an hourly basis, so they don't really have an incentive to be more efficient.
I feel like charging on an hourly basis is a common pattern in many industries that opens the doors to competition from startups with different pricing structures...as long as the startup can do everything in a manner compliant with the existing industry.
Logojoy, for instance, is an example of a service that supplants human labor with a single "good-enough" deliverable at a low price, and does so in a fraction of the amount of time. I imagine this would be much more difficult in legal settings, but LegalZoom seems to be alive and kicking, so it must be possible.
To your second paragraph, I would add that it's hard for customers (and lawyers) to figure out what is "good-enough" in the legal setting. I'm a lawyer and there's a lot of stuff you can find on the internet that I personally think is good enough (I would use it in my personal affairs because the risk of the missing edge cases being an actual problem is slim) but I wouldn't be comfortable recommending it as a solution to a client because those missing edge cases are a real malpractice risk.
In the case of a logo, good enough is whatever the client thinks is good enough. In the case of a lot of legal solutions, good enough is often a murky risk/reward calculation based on legal concepts the client may not understand completely.
I still think there's enormous room for improvement, both in helping clients understand the concepts and the risks they're taking, and also in providing better automated solutions.
I think it could be done, especially if you could gather enough information to show people the likelihood of certain problems happening given their circumstances. The biggest problem is that without software to do the heavy lifting, you're spending so much time talking to the client that you might as well be their lawyer. And then even if you save them money, their "real" attorney might argue against your advice or retrace all your steps at an hourly rate.
I'm sure that there are lots of legal consulting companies that do this for people and entities that consume lots of legal services but the real trick is providing it profitably to "unsophisticated" people doing a one time thing.
> I feel like charging on an hourly basis is a common pattern in many industries that opens the doors to competition from startups with different pricing structures...as long as the startup can do everything in a manner compliant with the existing industry.
That last step's a real doozy, though. Startups are a field that thinks "move fast and break stuff" is actually a good idea. That kind of thinking works when you're slinging viral social media and personal productivity services, but it is catastrophic when you try to move into an industry where your customers' lives or livelihoods are on the line.
Yes, it is insanely frustrating. I think I did fairly well in law school in part because I wrote a program to auto-format my cites, which saved me hours of mindless, awful, pedantic, irrelevant blue booking.
>The firm charges their clients on an hourly basis, so they don't really have an incentive to be more efficient.
While I agree that the billable hours system reduces the incentive to be more efficient, I don't think it removes it entirely. Otherwise lawyers would still be using typewriters to draft memos. In my experience, removing some of the inefficiencies frees up time and mental bandwidth to focus on activities which actually benefit the client. More time reading cases, researching, evaluating issues. And you can bill for that.
You hit the nail on the head, there is an incentive to automate legal services ala legal zoom but for lawyers themselves the more tedious and paper based the process is the more they can make.
Hourly billing is (very slowly) going away. Fixed fee arrangements will be king (people want predictability). So then a lawyer will want to be as efficient as possible. The legal industry is admittedly behind the times, but they do continue to move forward.
The firm charges their clients on an hourly basis, so they don't really have an incentive to be more efficient.