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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This week on Complex Systems, a continued discussion of credit card rewards, interchange, and what I believe is a persistent misconception about how society should want justice done via payments systems.
It ends with the following, which the team took the liberty of putting into a short clip. (Sound on if you like hearing my voice, but video is subtitled.)
Last week the Atlantic published an opinion piece which argues that the poor are subsidizing the rich's receipt of credit card rewards. This view has wide currency among certain advocates and among opinion writers.
It is not true.
Credit card rewards are actually funded by interchange, a cost which is ultimately paid by card-accepting businesses for a combination of services they get from the payments industry.
Rewards have a few equilibria globally; the U.S. is in a high rewards, high interchange one.
An argument I have had with some credit card enthusiasts for a very long time, paraphrased.
Enthusiasts: I’m robbing the bank blind!
Me: Doubtful? They are probably pretty happy to have a portfolio of you.
E: Oh by carefully layering promotions and making a spreadsheet and…
Me: So checking my understanding: you spend a lot of money on credit cards.
E: Yes, that’s the whole point.
Me: And in a nation which makes it illegal to underwrite using an IQ test, you have self-constructed an IQ test.
E: Yes and I pass it obviously.
Me: Right. Tracking.
Me: You sound like a very desirable bank customer.
E: Oh no I’m not! I take them so hard.
Me: Your income and net worth are likely to be quite higher in ten years right. You predict that too?
E: Oh yeah.
Me: Yeah you’re going to continue consuming lots of financial services.
There is a general feeling in some quarters that the payments industry functions as a tax on everyone, and that the incidence of this tax must be highest on the poor, because they're least likely to have a rewards card.
Last up at #microconf, Marcos Rivera from Pricing I/O on pricing.
"How to avoid stupid mistakes in SaaS pricing"
(I am likely to have some thoughts.)
As always, quotes are Marcos (lightly paraphrased; real time is hard), anything attributed to Marcos is a heavy paraphrase, anything unattributed is me.
Marcos was previously Head of Pricing for Vista Equity Partners (hoohah; noted PE firm in software space).
This is a useful enough specific observation that I'm promoting the general observation to text:
Organizations don't make decisions. People at organizations make decisions. Very often, there is one lynchpin person who must hypercommit to an org doing something for that to be.
From this follows any number of corollaries, including:
1) If you desire change in an org, it is really useful to understand who, specifically, is the lynchpin for the change you want to see.
2) You might be offered the choice to be that person at some point in your career.
This will rarely follow someone whose job title is Quest Giver coming to you with a choice of two pills, one of which is failure and one of which is success, with clearly listed of side effects.
One of the cultural quirks of capitalists is that there are many lies that one is allowed or even encouraged to tell in society, and capitalists are members of society, but are in principle not allowed to lie about revenue.
I have jokingly phrased this as “Certain forms of writing are sacred. For example, if you write the word Balance Sheet on top of a list of numbers, those numbers become sacred to capitalists, and a lie amongst them is a sin that the gods of capitalism will punish most severely.”
But this causes a cultural disconnect because society broadly allows many fudgings of numbers. And e.g. conversations between management and investors allow for certain forms of salesmanship.
But about revenue: not allowed. We are pretty serious on that.