Crying need for access to legal help

There is a crying need for access to legal help. No one can afford lawyers. Individuals, professionals and small businesses can’t afford lawyers. Startups can’t afford lawyers. Big companies with large budgets for legal services struggle to afford lawyers. Even lawyers complain, genuinely, that they can’t afford lawyers.

LexPublica aims to solve this problem by opening up the world of legal knowledge to everyone.

The first practical step we’ll take is to make common contract templates available free of charge. These will include things that many businesses need, such as employment agreements, website development agreements and non-disclosure agreements (NDAs for short). The contract templates will be written in plain language and have supporting guides to help you use them properly.

Along with the contract templates, we’ll provide other information about contracts and the law to help you make informed decisions. With that, you can also make a better decision about when you want to prepare a contract yourself and when you want to consult a lawyer.

In short, LexPublica puts control of your legal life back in your hands.

Online community to create global legal commons

Tackling an enterprise of this magnitude requires an enormous team effort. LexPublica will need to be a global online community of lawyers and non-lawyers working together to create contract templates and informational guides for those templates.

The grand vision is to harness this community effort to create the reference source for contract templates generally, for practical legal information, and beyond that, for all legal knowledge across all areas of law. You might call it a global legal commons.

Think we're crazy? Wikipedia, Linux and other similar projects provide successful and similarly sized examples for us to follow.

Yes, we have a real business too

There’s a commercial twin to LexPublica, called 8.5x14 (named after legal size paper). It will provide a wide range of commercial services, both for people and businesses who need legal services, and for the lawyers who serve them. These services will be built around LexPublica’s open content and open APIs.

As one example, imagine an online workspace to manage your business’s standard contract templates, your contract negotiations and your dealings with your lawyer. The service is simple contract management, something like the Basecamp project management web service, but for contracts and negotiations.

So if you’re the person in your company who deals with contracts and the paperwork that goes along with them, you’ll be able to do that faster and more efficiently. Instead of emailing versions of contracts in Microsoft Word back and forth with your customers (and with your lawyer too, if you’re using a lawyer), and losing track of who’s got the most up-to-date version and who made what changes, you’ll have the online workspace to manage that process and to manage the evolving versions with proper change tracking. You can get the deal done faster, with fewer headaches.

8.5x14 has other commercial services on the drawing board, and we'll be talking about those as we develop them.

Open approach

We’ll be using best practices for collaborative online platforms and content, like open APIs, open formats, open standards and Creative Commons licensing.

Our Founders

Martin Ertl – Martin is an entrepreneur and a lawyer. He co-founded Navarik, where he helped lead the company through its evolution from startup to professionally managed organization and raised the Series A financing. He also negotiated business-critical deals with customers such as Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum (BP), Chevron and the government of Venezuela. He likes ham, mushroom and spinach pizza. You can reach Martin by email.

Zak Greant – Zak has spent the last 14 years building little parts of the Net, from individual websites up to advising and helping manage the organizations that build key pieces of Internet technology and infrastructure. During this time, he has contributed to and worked with the PHP project, MySQL AB, the Mozilla Foundation, the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. You can reach Zak by email.