Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Apr 7, 2020 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
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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More from @patio11

Jan 24
“I spoke with 21 billionaires” is historically the sort of flex you could only imagine in the top of tier 1 media, and ironically I think they’re probably least capable of it today, after a few years of burning karma wantonly.
Many of the emails will say “I just want to hear your side of the story” and many of them will even actually mean that and come from reporters who respect sources and promises they’ve made to them.

But other emails said the same words and then did not follow through.
One of the reasons Solana can do this is he has a persistent reputation in the ecosystem and everyone knows it. This historically was true for some institutions, but during a rough period for them they developed principle/agent problems.
Read 13 tweets
Jan 21
Odd Lots has a really fantastic episode on why Claude Code matters, and while it is likely not directly useful for you if you follow me, it is the single best artifact I’ve seen for that smart person you want to quickly educate about this.

overcast.fm/+AA5AWOwPyEo
Quick hits:

* How giving LLMs capability to write Unix commands gives them deterministic access to ~60 years of powerful, composable software capabilities
* LLMs are quickly becoming the “interpretation layer” and a lot of work is that, at varying levels of abstraction
* Says a really important takeaway that most of the world has not internalized: this fundamentally transforms a field/craft in a way which predictive autocomplete was not going to.
Read 5 tweets
Dec 30, 2025
In many domains a generalist who is good at AI and puts an hour or two into something will be three to four sigma from the mean entrant into a support / escalation / etc inbox.

Mitchell has an example from bug reports; I can easily imagine examples from e.g. financial issues.
I think *once* when doing advocacy work for people with banking/credit problems I ran into someone who had an organized call / letter log and so could cleanly generate a timeline that the financial institution could match up with their own files (and obligations).
Try it if you don't believe me but if you give AI a bunch of unstructured input like most people's impressionistic account of how this has been so frustrating dealing with the bank, they will frequently redigest it into "Here's a timeline with bullet points."

That is *useful.*
Read 12 tweets
Dec 9, 2025
Considering writing about non-coding LLM workflows a bit in December partially for personal interest and partially so people can see concrete examples of progress / usage.
The one easiest for me to talk about is just a geeky hobby: here's a plastic model and then here is ChatGPT producing a painting reference of ~that model, after a discussion on characterization, color scheme, etc. Image
Image
I honestly love using it in my art projects. Hallucination rate is acceptable given ~wide acceptance criteria in art; like Bob Ross used to say, there are only happy accidents if e.g. its suggested recipe for mixing a teal paint does not actually result in teal immediately.
Read 7 tweets
Nov 5, 2025
If I clipped every good Byrne Hobart or Matt Levine line I’d never get around to writing my own stuff but this from Byrne is too good to not share: Image
An extraordinary fact about finance is that there are some firms which are financial service providers specifically for scams which sometimes, almost as an industrial accident, bafflingly end up in a contractual relationship with a legitimate, successful company.
These underwriters are not necessarily that; some overlevered highly “structured” IPOs of midmarket software businesses should have a non-zero price, and a capitalist should not say they are a scam just because he is not a buyer at that price.
Read 8 tweets
Oct 27, 2025
How much could would you write if you could one-shot 10-100 line shell scripts or similar almost all of the time, in 10 seconds? You would write a stupid amount of code. Who cares if it is disposable? Dispose of it; it's basically free.
"But what if the code is wrong?"

Skill issue, code is free to you. Write a test suite too, designed to be thrown away in under a minute. Write three independent implementations and vote on the answer. etc, etc
"Have you actually done this?" Yeah, to a minor degree, and I'll recount a bit more when I do some writeups about my experience with LLM programming. After a few weeks of climbing the skill curve instead of some direct questions I'd say "Goal: *direct question* You should..."
Read 11 tweets

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