Peter Thiel on The Future of Legal Technology

The legal industry is perfectly suited to be utterly destroyed by startups. It's pure information work, it can be done from offshore, it is generally disliked by the public, and as a whole is pretty much entirely technologically inept.<p>Certification regimes present a barrier to full automation, but with so many young and unemployed lawyers, you could easily get around that as well. Just do most of the stuff on the computer and let Mr. cheap-young-JD sign off on the last mile work on his phone. Each contract he goes through knocks another $100 off his student loan bill. Use the law schools' oversupply to break the legal industry and bring cheap legal services to all.<p>The main threat will be regulation. Putting lawyers out of work will mean they will try to rewrite the law to ban you. Depending on how you structure it, you might want to ally with a few firms in each vertical to rain fire upon their competitors. As long as you divide and conquer, and some lawyers are profiting from the new regime, it will make it much more difficult for the ABA to achieve consensus on the imminent threat your startup undoubtedly poses to the health of the republic.<p>EDIT: Even more interesting...as a dotcom you may also be able to market your services in a way that normal lawyers cannot.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_advertising#In_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_advertising#In_the_United...</a>

I think Thiel misses a key point: getting the right answer isn't necessarily as important as the appearance of justice. Human beings are fundamentally emotional creatures, especially in situations when they feel they have been wronged or are accused of wronging someone else. The whole process of a trial with a human judge and a human jury doesn't just resolve a dispute, but it serves as an emotional palliative allowing people to get beyond the dispute.<p>And that is, of course, one of the key functions of the legal system as a system of dispute resolution: allowing society to continue to function by helping people get over disputes.

This is surprisingly naive for someone like Peter Thiel. The law is not an axiomatic rule based system, and it's far too complex and fuzzy to be automated.<p>We haven't even automated medical records for godsakes!

Well why not start somewhere, create axiomatic TOS for example and proceed with contracts between companies.<p>There has to be academic groundwork to build something like that, a mixture of CS and law. Maybe some students at a law faculty could create a project together with a few CS students just to get the stone rolling.<p>A programming language to describe who is responsible for cleaning the flat.