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Legal Portals – Supercharge your Business
Legal portals will help close deals faster and on better terms, all while providing a great experience for you and your client. Legal Portals? Huh? Legal portals are websites dedicated to your legal function. Specifically, you would post your standard terms and contracts online. Today, many small businesses already have privacy policies on their website.…
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Code as Contracts – The Appeal of True “Code
There is a growing number of advocates of coding for lawyers. Their approaches can range from general tech awareness to writing actual computer code. In this post, I want to talk about lawyers writing code; specifically, turning contracts into code. Practical Challenges of Programming Let’s get this out of the way first, code as contracts…
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Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in Legal Tech
What is OCR? Optical character recognition (OCR) is foundational for many legal tech tools. OCR is the technology that turns images or scans of documents into plain text that a computer can recognize. For example, you might have scanned a paper contract and saved it as a JPEG image file. What you really want, and…
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Response: Law Isn’t Code
The idea of “law as code” isn’t new. There has long been a body of thought which posits there are significant benefits if the law can be expressed as computer code. On the other hand, there are challenges both practical and theoretical in expressing law as code. The Argument in Law Isn’t Code Artificial Lawyer…
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Standardizing contracts – not a hopeless endeavor
One of the puzzles I faced as a new in-house lawyer was the lack of standardization for generic documents. Why does every lawyer have their own versions of documents that are practically never negotiated anyways? Example: Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) The NDA has been the low hanging fruit kicking off many legal tech projects. There…
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Downtime (30 minutes) – March 30, 2022
Unfortunately reference.legal experienced 30 minutes of unscheduled downtime from roughly 6:05pm to 6:35pm PST on March 30, 2022. The issue appears to be an unfortunate coincidence. We were in the midst of updating to 0.0.2.2-beta which created a short burst of requests to our backend database. At the same time, we had a sudden bump…
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Site Update: New Version Prompt
I’m excited to share a simple new feature for reference.legal documents. We’ve included an info-box on top of the document view to clearly identify the version you are looking at. More importantly, we’ve made it quite conspicuous when you are not on the latest version. Most users in user-testing are not comfortable with legal text…
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Web Contracts – How web formatting changes contracts?
Web contracts, or documents on the web are increasingly popular. However, paper documents are still common. Even when digitized, we scan in physical documents or export to PDF files, locked down to the standard 8.5×11 sheet. This might not be an issue for a paperback novel, but contracts are rarely ever considered easy reads. Modern…
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We need more simplicity in legal tech
What is the most common reason legal departments fail to adopt legal tech? If you Google that question, the same answer appears over and over: purchasing software doesn’t magically solve problems. It’s the process that solves problems. Process over features If you enter the market hoping to pick some service off-the-shelf, you’re in for a…
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Hello world!
Welcome to the reference.legal blog! Let’s keep this short and sweet. Our new blog is meant to provide you with site news and updates. We’re going to be adding some relevant content and articles as well.