Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
I work for the Internet and am an advisor to @stripe. These are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted.

Apr 7, 2020, 6 tweets

This business model, and this is not legal advice, is very clever.

From a product perspective: you believe there is basically a pure arbitrage opportunity on the letters "Esq." at the end of a letter and are making it available at minimal cost.

From supplier perspective: you are a reliable stream of low-complexity work orders.

I speculate, with rather high confidence, that most transactional lawyers a) affirmatively dislike this work, b) would do it it for clients' convenience, c) would not work with clients of this service, and d) are aware of and would be deeply skeptical of the arbitrage mechanism.

And so there is a bit of a tension here between "There is a widely reported glut of supply in legal market and accordingly *someone* with a license in your state should be extremely happy to have this work today" and "The guild *has to* be institutionally skeptical of this offer"

There are some other arbitrage opportunities in low-complexity legal work, some via traditional methods (specialization of labor within firms, paralegals, specialized services firms, etc) and some via "business model with a software front-end."

I've used one in not too distant past, and if it works will talk about experience publicly, where offering was 45% software, 50% non-credentialed human labor and ~5% "I, a lawyer, sign off on the legal conclusion that the client and non-professionals view this matter correctly."

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