Legal templates are complete nonsense
Templates are boring, necessary evils that legaltech should be wary about, not embrace.
Every lawyer’s chamber has a homemade pot of templates, like homes do pickles and jams.
While the latter make the bland palatable, templates make the palatable bland.
This post is not meant to be complaint on how artless the idea of regurgitating writing is. As much as we dislike the unoriginal, we serve real people with real budgets and difficult deadlines. Templates can’t have therefore been a recent invention, they have been with us and will be for the foreseeable future. They make it easier to build on layers of other people’s work, reduce errors of omission and lighten the overloaded attention to detail that the jobs of wordsmiths already require.
Last week I wrote about how many legaltech startups can be classified into whether they solve the “reading” versus “writing” problem. This enthusiasm for building on templates has been embraced by legaltech as a potential solution to both, the reading as well as writing problems. The thinking goes somewhat like this - “If we can reduce your business to x number of templates, then we can do the writing for you. If everyone adopts the same templates, then we can read for you as well.”
The argument in favour would go - If we throw enough capital, attention and resources at standardising templates, we solve most drafting and review problems not only elegantly but also to a high degree of accuracy. While there will be areas where the simplicity of an industry or transaction will yield universal agreement on “templates”, it is likely that they have already cracked the problems themselves (or can) with 1970s mainframes and a few lines of code. So I will exclude this sort of low-hanging fruit from discussion, and you may disagree and please tell me if that’s underestimating how bad the problem is.
Assuming I am not, when it comes to anything a little more complex, standardisation of templates seems to be easier said than done. One of my legaltech entrepreneur friends used to complain that because tailormaking is a friend of the legal profession and contract managers, “vested interests” hold back standardisation. As someone inside the legal profession, I see both the immense benefits of “templatisation” but also its limitations. Templates are constantly evolving, agreements that cover the same subject matter look different across even relatively small periods of time. The updates can reflect a combination of unrelated factors - development of case law, identification of new risks, change in how a certain type of transaction or case is viewed by courts, simplification, innovation - some good reasons, some bad, some that cut out the excess fat and some which pile on.
Trying to solve the writing and reading problem by focussing your efforts on making it easy to store, manage and develop templates is fine, but I feel its just about fine. You will be constantly running after changing goal posts, and unintentionally end up killing a lot of basic legal training that will make legal managers relevant again.
Point is, there may be better ways to think about how we write, read and review documents. The question is whether I am on to something here, or complicating a simple problem that just needs more hammers, tongs and dollars thrown its way?
Before I go, the response to my last post and first substack was great and I enjoyed it so much that I wrote this post before time. Thank you for reading and especially those of you who reached out, it ended up sparking some great conversations on innovating for the law. I hope to share more insights on these and insights gained from them on thinking about solving the “reading problem” in a future letter.
Until next time.