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

Dec 13
A contractor said something during this project which I thought was both compassionate and the sign that he was a skilled professional, and I thought I’d share:

Scene: My mother, who has some mobility challenges, is sketching out what she wants in her kitchen. He listens.
Then he takes me aside. Following conversation is indicative.

Me: All sound reasonable?
Him: I’ll build whatever you two decide on, but I wanted to have a conversation with you in private first.
Him: Nobody wants to get old and nobody wants their parents to get old, but it happens to everyone, and may God grant your mother many happy years.
Me: Thank you for saying that.
Him: How big do you think a wheelchair is?
Me: Mom doesn’t…
Read 6 tweets
Dec 11
Ruriko: I asked at the train station how to use the automated gates to get the child’s rate for Lillian.
Me: OK.
Ruriko: That was really hard.
Me: OK.
Ruriko: Then I asked the attendant how old children could be and still receive the child’s rate. Do you know what she told me?
Me: I will bet it did not include a correct answer.
Ruriko: How can you work as a train station attendant and not know that answer.
Me: *sigh* America.
Someday I need a better URL describing The Sort.
Read 5 tweets
Dec 9
So, debanking.
I try to be non-partisan in professional spaces. That is due, in no small part, to the acceptable spectrum of opinions in tech spaces as having been about 70 nanometers or so wide for much of the last few years.
Also, related to that, there is this fun game which is played on Twitter, where you adversarially claim that someone represents their employer, elaborate that something they have said causes a workplace safety or PR issue, and then ask for them to made an example of.
Read 17 tweets
Dec 5
We’re going to hear many, many more stories that round to this one.
One subvariant of them is that early adopters of LLMs outside of companies are going to tell those companies *things they do not know about themselves.*
People often diagnose malice or reckless indifference in a SOP which misquotes the constellation of agreements backing e.g. a rental contract.

Often it is more Seeing like a Really Big Business issues than either of those. Everyone did their job, system in totality failed.
Read 6 tweets
Dec 2
A thread on identity theft pervasiveness (and unpleasant remediation processes) in a population which experiences many challenges.
I'll observe two things which are counterintuitive:

1) You might naively assume that "identities" get more valuable as one moves up the socioeconomic ladder, but there is a discontinuity, because certain societally-favored identities have payment streams associated with them.
These go down sharply in working class and don't rise above that level again until you either a) get fairly deep into the upper middle class / PMC or b) somehow manage to get someone's full social security payment, which is (for various reasons) much less likely than other ways.
Read 14 tweets
Nov 21
Meta comment: this is going to be one of the longest and most heavily cited research results in the software industry.
As to the object level phenomenon, eh, clearly happens. I don’t know if I have strong impressions on where the number is for various orgs.
Many of these people believe they are good at their jobs and I am prepared to believe for a tiny slice of them that they are actually right.
Read 7 tweets

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