Start-Up Designs Legal Work 2.0 Around Prospect of Universal Archive
Ari Hershowitz is betting all U.S. laws, regulations and published court decisions will be available at low cost online within a few years. He thinks tying document-workflow and discussion tools into this body of law will transform the legal work from constantly reinventing the wheel behind the doors of isolated offices to close collaboration within and even between practices.
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Hershowitz left a career in environmental law to become CEO of Tabulaw, a seed-funded start-up in San Francisco. Starting with a two-sentence website, the company promises to “make the law work for everyone. … We aim to make legal research more productive for the practitioner and more accessible for everyone else.” Hershowitz’s credentials include a master’s degree in computation and neural sciences from Cal Tech in addition to a law degree from Georgetown University. He worked briefly at the Interior Department after nine years with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The first version of Tabulaw’s planned software-as-a-service offering is being prepared for introduction this year, Hershowitz said. “The system’s been built, and we're working with partners to make it the legal workflow tool that they want.” It will let customers share documents and their creation internally and externally as they wish, connected to cited authorities by hyperlink, he said. “We're looking for the next round” of investment -- “angel and venture money,” Hershowitz said.
Tabulaw’s premise is that information technology is overdue to vault the legal profession into the 21st century from the 1980s, Hershowitz said. What’s called primary law -- the rules set by all government branches at all levels -- will be available free online to consumers by 2013, he predicted. “Some states may claim some copyright in their statutes, but I don’t think that’s tenable … technically or politically” in an Internet world, Hershowitz said. LexisNexis and West controlling access to much underlying law will be broken, and they and companies like his are gearing up to compete to “add value,” he said.
A private primary-law archive seems more promising than the federally supported effort promoted by Carl Malamud’s Law.org (WID Jan 14 p6) to produce “a centralized, authoritative database of the law … well-structured, so it’s better able to be used,” Hershowitz said. “Companies like ours could pay for bulk access” provided by “a nonprofit corporation or a centralized source that is independent.” He said a group of law libraries could play the central role. “The federal government is going to have a really hard time convincing all of the states to provide it their state law.” When Tabulaw’s pieces come together, the result will resemble the Talmud, Hershowitz said, referring to the body of rabbis’ discussion of Judaism: “Lawyers commenting on the law and commenting on that commentary."
There’s plenty for Tabulaw to do meanwhile, Hershowitz said. Sources from Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute to Google Scholar are making more primary law available free all the time, he said. Meanwhile, law offices in a Web 2.0 world are stuck in production and publishing by Microsoft Word, scanner and PDF, he said. “The legal industry is probably one of the last to experience the transformation of the Internet."
The company will “take the current forms of social networking and put them in a professional context,” Hershowitz said. Making participants use their true identities will increase the value of the information, he said. The technology will need to take into account requirements such as protecting proprietary work and clients’ confidentiality, he said. “We are using a user-centered design methodology developed at Stanford Design school and we will be working out the implementation of many of these questions with our initial test users, to make sure that it meets their needs for security and privacy.”
The main official action required “will be in how legal information is prepared by government entities,” Hershowitz said. “There is already a trend toward standardizing the e-format of government legal publications, and that trend will only grow stronger. We expect that eventually there will be a standardized XML format for publishing statutes, regulations and even court opinions."
The company has strong winds at its back in undertaking the transformation of an ancient profession comparable to the switch from typewriters to PCs, Hershowitz said. Many lawyers under about age 40 are bewildered by the way it operates, he said. And firms are under huge financial pressure to rationalize how they run. Still, they're willing to reach into deep pockets when the payoff is evident, Hershowitz said: “Lawyers will buy anything to make their work better. … There’s a price insensitivity.” Their impulse to make their opinions known counteracts their tendency to close off their work, he said.