The jhana Philosophy

Lawyers are Agents representing their Principals. Centuries of fraud add verbose procedure that noise out the Principal's intent.

Principals—people, organizations, governments—want to secure their rights and intents. They wish to collaborate with each other for mutual gain. Legal systems arose to facilitate this will. But centuries of fraud and abuse forced us to constrain interactions between people into well-defined procedures and modus operandi.

Lawyers arose as Agents of the Principals to defend their interests from present and potential adversity. But over the years, instead of remaining a means to an end, the law has increasingly become an end of itself. Rote and repetitive work abounds, and lawyers have far too much on their hands.

As programmers, our own jobs were one of the first to be significantly impacted by AI. And honestly, more than anything else, it has made our work less frustrating, focusing us on the creative and intelligent parts of our day. We are inspired by the research into programming aids, that if not for anything else, boast far greater job satisfaction after their advent.

Broadly there are three common and difficult legal tasks we have our eyes on. First, is retrieval—finding the right caselaw, fishing out a clause in diligence, and other needles in haystacks. Computers are great at processing large quanta of information in short time.

The second is routine negotiation and deal-making. Companies start deals with their well-defined templates and spend months ironing out details, although they possess great records of histories of fall-backs and deal sizes. Computers can help speed through the first few drafts and redlines to get to what really matters.

The third is insider knowledge. Often the distinguishment of a good lawyer is knowing what the history of a patent filing office or opposing counsel is. We want to make this kind of intelligence available to everyone.