@altgate

More “Open Source” Legal Tools

Last year I wrote a post about WSGR’s new term sheet generator and how that was part of an overall trend to “open source” the legal industry.  Open source is the wrong term though; instead is probably better to say automate since LegalZoom and others are doing the same thing but commercially.  I think this is great for end users both personal and professional, but I think it is going to seriously erode legal industry revenue in the long term.  It’s silly to pay by the hour to have the same documents generated over and over.

Another great example is a new tool I learned about today.  It’s a Terms of Service and Privacy Policy generator by Legal River.  This is great for micro ISVs or small organizations that don’t want or need to pay hundreds of dollars in legal fees to get a basic agreement in place.  It’s fast and easy to use and generates easy to use, copy-paste HTML.  All you have to do is answer some basic questions and then voila, you have your nicely formatted agreement (which you can obviously edit if you like).


Tos
It looks like a great service.  It’s free and I’m sure I’ll use it in the future.

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Categorised as: Management, Startups, Technology

  • Dennis Calderon

    This looks like a great tool, especially for startups. I recently began offering a similar type of tool for generating basic annual shareholder and director meeting minutes at http://www.minutesgenerator.com. The aim is to enable better compliance for small corporations and avoid heavy spending on legal fees for what is normally a basic administrative matter.

    • http://www.altgate.com/ fnazeeri

      Dennis, that’s awesome! Great example of two sets of legal documents that should be automated.

  • http://theseotoolkit.com/ julius

    You should also set up an email address with your new domain, and remember use this as your contact on your blog. By doing this you can easily have that domain email merge into your existing Gmail account so you can “reply as” from your blog email.

  • http://www.theseotoolkit.com/ Julius

    No matter what industry you question, the current financial climate has changed everyone in America. There are hardly any industries that are recession-proof and it is illustrated with lower earnings, staggering unemployment rates, manufacturers going out of business and more. The legal industry, while many supposed would be blocked from the recession because there will always be a need for lawyers, has also been affected. Here are a number of positive and negative ways the present recession has affected the legal industry.