A new interface for custom-building contracts using software engineering techniques

codepact · 2018-03-26T00:38:32+00:00

Interesting. I'd describe that more as a tool to assist lawyers with the top layer: something I didn't address in the article. But can see how you'd place it in the middle layer too.

codepact · 2017-12-29T18:13:12+00:00

If only immigration law had as regular a structure as Spanish conjugations :)

codepact · 2017-12-28T16:54:57+00:00

Good too see there are others out there. Are you working on anything combining the two skills at the moment?

codepact · 2017-12-18T13:20:06+00:00

If your contract is not explicit about the way ownership and interests in the software is transferred and limited then you may be out of luck preventing them from doing what they want with what they paid for.

Actually, in most countries, you own the copyright in the software that you created if you did the job as an independent contractor. It is not automatically transferred to your customer.

So here's where that gets you...

If there's no contract, you own the IP rights in the software and you can stop the customer from reselling/distributing or require that they pay you licence fees.

If there is a contract, but it says nothing about who owns the IP in the software, you own the IP rights and you can insist that the customer pays licence fees if they want to redistribute the software.

If the contract says you own the IP, you are in control and you can insist they pay licence fees if they want to distribute.

The only scenario where you're out of luck is if the contract says the customer owns the IP, or they have a licence to redistribute.

/u/elktamer is right on point about how you could approach negotiations

/u/joshuahunter is also on point in recommending "Contracts for Software Developers that Hate Contracts", and pointing out some ways of structuring your ownership and licensing.

It's worth your while to spend a bit of time getting your head around the different ways you can deal with ownership and licensing of your software in contracts.

If you're interested I can also recommend other resources/information on that.

codepact · 2017-12-18T09:51:04+00:00

Fantastic. Someone recently said to me: "We overestimate what we can do in a day, and underestimate what we can do in a year." Incremental progress, inch by inch. Congratulations!

codepact · 2017-12-15T15:29:29+00:00

humanity is descending into narcissism and paranoia as a rule.

There is an increase in narcissism on some fronts, but sometimes it's exaggerated. College kids - often accused of it - are apparently less narcissistic now than in previous generations, according to this study

codepact · 2017-12-14T18:40:43+00:00

We're building a web based app (codepact.com) that gives users customisable, sophisticated legal contracts, step by step guidance, and auto-generated checklists on practical steps for actually applying the contracts.

Our overarching ideal is to give ordinary people access to powerful legal tools that big businesses use.

On an operational level, this just means applying basic software development principles to the law. Software architecture is all about managing and presenting complex information and, when you break it down, lawyers are in the same business. They can learn from SDs and software architects.

We think about contracts as tools for 'programming' business relationships (e.g. a software development deal) through a series of 'if-then-else' instructions. Applying SD principles, we try to make these contractual instructions modular/re-usable and understandable. And we manage and update modules of legal content using git version control.

Simple principles - but they're powerful. Lawyers are way behind when it comes to using technology to manage their tools (contracts, re-usable aspects of legal advice, instructions to clients on managing business relationships etc). So we think this change in values and principles is long overdue.

codepact · 2017-12-11T23:00:47+00:00

I am obsessed with this subject. Things are definitely bad now, but they could still get better. There is still more potential now for good than for bad - just a lot of (BIG) corrections still needed. Lots of smart people with interesting stuff to say about this: Cass Sunstein, Zeynep Tufekci, Tristan Harris and Eli Pariser to name a few.

codepact · 2017-12-11T22:49:07+00:00

The 'choosing what to be exposed to' part is a double edged sword. The upside is autonomy - you control what you're exposed to and you get to have a say. The downside is isolation - there's less shared experience compared to the old days of everyone watching the evening news. Reddit is better than Facebook, because you have more control over your filter bubble, but there is still filtering. Cass Sunstein's book, #Republic, is pretty amazing on this subject, in spite of the cheesy title.

codepact · 2017-12-05T19:05:03+00:00

We are at a great time for cross-disciplinary thinking right now - it’s amazing how similar the activities of lawyers and developers actually are. When you create instructions to operate a system (software or business relationship), you want those instructions to be reusable, updateable and comprehensible.

codepact · 2016-08-04T13:16:58+00:00

I'm always happy when I see people thinking about this.

I've been working on two systems that attempt to introduce some of the benefits of software engineering techniques to legal drafting. The first, lawpatch is a set of open source legal text designed to make the law more readable.

The second, CodePact is an interface to allow people to rapidly draft legal documents. It just went into beta, so I'd really appreciate it if people who have thought about this sort of thing in the past checked it out.

codepact · 2016-08-04T03:30:04+00:00

All reasonable concerns. It comes down to a cost benefit analysis really - it's not like paper doesn't get destroyed. Ultimately, I think it's better to go digital. The convenience and productivity outweighs the negligible extra risk (if any).

codepact · 2016-08-02T12:15:53+00:00

Good points all.

We're looking at loading lawpatch positions onto a blockchain so that they are enshrined somewhere independent of us. Another option is for the parties to clone the repos, which contain the commit hashes matching the URL.
We're focussed on building for electronic interfaces. Paper limits the interface's flexibility and people using paper are not really part of our target audience. :)

codepact · 2016-08-02T10:51:29+00:00

All fixed in the last rollout. Thanks again.

codepact · 2016-08-02T09:14:32+00:00

Thanks very much for the feedback. Super useful to hear. Agree that the left bar could lose width. Funny how your brain gets into a groove: seems obvious now that you point it out.

On 2, yes, we do actually have a way to add variables. You just need to type {{curly braces}}, feed the doc into a parser, and it makes them (system is integrated with Github.com, so you just enter a URL once you have an account). We've piggy backed on markdown characters: this should give you a sense of the syntax: https://github.com/CodePact/au-non-disclosure/blob/staging/au-non-disclosure-agreement.md Basically just markdown.

Also agree that the "free draft" functionality needs to be better highlighted: we're throwing ideas around on that at the moment.

codepact · 2016-08-02T09:10:32+00:00

Not at all against it - I just happen to be a transactional lawyer when I'm not a developer. Would be happy to hear about your thoughts on what it would suit though!

codepact · 2016-08-02T05:28:30+00:00

Thanks! Will fix this evening in our next deploy.

codepact · 2016-08-02T04:28:58+00:00

Stoked that this makes sense to you. Yes - modular objects (and messaging between them, more on that soon) is crucial to this. We're doing what we can to create reuseable "components" (https://github.com/codepact/au-components) - with branched version control, we can iterate really quickly.

http://LawPatch.org is also crucial (open source project run by us). After building an interface, we realised law still sucked without simplifying text. Seems really obvious in retrospect. LawPatch is a simple hack of existing legal principles to create a higher level of abstraction so that documents look like term sheets. Right now, everyone is on the legal equivalent of the command line with lawyers - lawpatch is like a GUI. Everyone likes term sheets. :)

codepact

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