theContractsGuy is a new blog and I’m still finding my voice. So far I’ve pretty much kept to the topic of contracts and the process of contracting. But those who follow my Twitter feed, Facebook page, and LinkedIn updates know that I’m also interested in other areas of business law, legal services technology, the changes the legal profession is undergoing, and law firm business models. (I’m also interested in Latin, but I don’t tweet about that very often.)
I’ve often been tempted to cover those topics here, but, other than this brief description of an area in the nether regions of the blog where I’ve posted links to interesting discussions about law firm business models, I’ve resisted the urge. That might change, but not today.
Although I’ve tried to stay on topic here, I have chimed in from time to time on other people’s blogs, and I thought I’d do my own personal version of the Twitter tradition of #FollowFriday and invite you to a few discussions around the blogosphere that I’ve enjoyed being a part of. The blogs where these discussions occurred are some of my favorites, and I’d encourage you to subscribe to their feeds.
Crowdsourcing and Open Source Contracts
Discussions about crowdsourcing and open source contracts have popped up from time to time on the blogs I follow regularly. This post on Bill Carleton’s blog sparked a lively exchange in the comments between Bill, Asher Bearman, Jeremy Freeland, Florian Feder, Ken Adams, and me. The conversation spilled over onto Ken Adams’s The Koncise Drafter blog in this post. I also had an interesting exchange with jaybirdfive on the same topic in the comments to my review of Koncision’s automated confidentiality agreement product.
The High Cost of Lawyers
In this post venture capitalist Fred Wilson challenged lawyers with an assertion that legal representation of a start-up in a seed round shouldn’t cost more than $5,000. The post has nearly 300 comments, so to see my two cents, click here. I later posted my musings about some of the reasons legal services costs remain high in this Quora answer to the question “Why are lawyers so expensive with the excess supply of lawyers?” For a much better answer to the question, here is Antone Johnson’s masterpiece.
Legal Services Technology
Commenting on a post on Pam Woldow’s At the Intersection blog, I shared some thoughts that can be summed up with this excerpt: “When I see what technology can do and then think about my own observations of how legal services are performed, I think something has to give because there’s too wide a gulf between how we work and how we could be working.” Tackling that problem pretty much sums up my chief professional challenge right now.
I also offered some thoughts about law firm quality control in the contract drafting process in the comments to The Perils of Revising Word Templates: An Example from a Recent Lawsuit at The Koncise Drafter.
On the Lighter Side
The most fun I’ve had on the blogosphere playground was writing an entry to this Elephant Post on 3 Geeks and a Law Blog where I urged law firms to simplify my life by adopting easy-to-remember brand names. Maybe it’s funny. Maybe not. But I cracked myself up. In fact, I’m smiling right now.
Thanks to all who have served as host to these stimulating conversations. I look forward to much fun ahead. Happy #FF!
Wow my own processes have been miirnrrog yours and those of Venkat. I have a similar problem my Inter Alia blog is based on a completely obsolete platform pMachine and I have no interest in moving to its new form (Expression Engine). Unfortunately, it’s also next to impossible to convert a pMachine blog to WordPress without significant issues.So I made the insane, suicidal decision to move my blog to WordPress manually one post at a time. This has actually allowed me to “clean up” my posts so far about 50% of my posts had links that had changed or disappeared entirely. When I reopen in WordPress, the blog will be leaner and more current.Like you, my interests have expanded from Internet Research to broader legal technology topics. Fortunately, changing the branding for the blog will be relatively simple. Inter Alia doesn’t connote any particular topic, so I’ll be able to just change the tag line (“Tom Mighell’s Legal Technology Blog, Among Other Things”) without a big uproar.But I definitely feel your pain I was literally paralyzed with indecision for months before deciding what to do. Now I only have about 4,000 posts to go!