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Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
@patio11
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

Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Jun 21
Two weeks ago my buddy @fulligin pulled me aside and said "I have something to show you." That something was the Daylight Computer, which I was previously unaware of.

I've since bought one and am using it fairly extensively for reading. Vincent recorded some impressions:
The DC-1 has a whiff of magic to it, comparable to the first time using a Kindle.

(Other people profess to have this feeling from the iPhone/iPad the first time. I honestly don't remember those as being "my life now has a before and an after" moments. Kindle was that.)
The Kindle is a substitute for paper, via eInk. It's the best available way to buy books, a somewhat mediocre reading experience which acts like an inferior substitute for paper, and an absolutely gobsmackingly frustrating software/hardware artifact to use.

I love mine to death.
Read 12 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Jun 13
Matt Levine has a great piece today (well, you knew that) covering Goodhart’s law in the context of how ineffective it is to track mouse movements as a proxy for white collar productivity.

I think this is tempting thing for management to institute because there is a… suspicion.
That suspicion is not “so-called ‘email jobs’ are actually not productive at all.” This is believed by many people on the Internet. Those people are greatly miscalibrated. The world runs on email. Email causes physical results in the world. Coordination/communication are valuable
The thing which management believes is “I have a rather strong suspicion that, somewhere in my vast workforce of people doing white collar jobs, there are malingerers. Not merely people who are bad at their job. No. Some who are actively abusing me, and laughing about it.”
Read 14 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Jun 10
A memorable moment in new employee training for me was when the trainer said that most people working professionally in our field could not whiteboard out funds and data flow between all entities in a credit card transaction. She asked why I could, given no experience in industry
The answer I gave was that I had credit card processing accounts before and read the documentation and contracts carefully. This was true, but was a bit of a fib.

The real reason was I was curious about how PayPal worked in 2004 and had some time to kill.
You’d be surprised what you can learn by reading more of the Internet than anyone thinks is reasonable.

You’d also be surprised how many people consider themselves cogs in a machine, with a bit of knowledge of what their gears touch and then no real interest beyond that.
Read 4 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Jun 8
Once upon a time I wrote letters on behalf of people to banks. I don’t do that anymore, in general, but I still get asked sometimes. I have been told, but not tried much, that GPT is very good when you tell it to cosplay as me specifically doing this.

So today I got an email.
In “help the correspondent learn to fish” mode, I suggested they use ChatGPT to do this. But, since prompt engineering is a thing, thought I could take 30 seconds to write an example prompt.

And why not try it.

So.

chatgpt.com/share/7695f02b…
This is not verbatim a letter I once ghostwrote on behalf of someone in exactly this situation, and you can see in the transcript that I had one or two thoughts. But otherwise, this is almost exactly what I’d write.

Took 30 seconds, and not the 15 minutes this typically did.
Read 6 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Jun 3
An interesting outcome of LLMs plus CNC machines would be reversing the much-lamented decline in adornment on buildings.

“For an upcharge of $X00 per square foot, we can do a frieze in any style you can imagine.”
(If one doesn’t like the LLM part of it then sculptors exist, and decoupling their location from the building’s location is ~newly an option.)
(I suspect the guy I like in France who does really nice elves would be happy to use the usual workflow on the usual tools to deliver the usual STL file of a Greek god with the funny non-usual detail being the final print will not be 32mm tall.)
Read 5 tweets
Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
May 27
Somewhat self-indulgent because I'm mentioned in the thread, but yeah, this is a concrete example of Google getting convincingly outcompeted in search, *which should surprise me* and no longer does.
I haven't yet replaced my core uses of Google Search with "just ask an LLM already, they have a non-zero chance of getting it right" but I think there are a lot of searches for a lot of people where that is already obviously the optimal play.
One very common genre for me is "tip of the tongue" searches, which for common knowledge questions I've already moved entirely to ChatGPT, but for "can you find a document I read in mid-2000s with the following properties" I still default to considered use of Google.
Read 5 tweets

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