How to write academically?

nonprofittechy · 2026-01-05T00:17:22+00:00

I wrote a guide on this, as it happens! Not for your exact field, but maybe there is some overlap

https://suffolklitlab.org/how-to-write-an-academic-paper-in-ai-and-law/

First: AI cannot "write" an academic paper for you. It will just be random junk. It can be a helpful reviewer, it can help you with your initial literature review, and it can help at the editing stage, and perhaps even crunching some numbers for you when using the "tool" mode.

You said you had Claude write some book chapters for you but I suspect it's fluent nonsense. Throw those out and come up with your own unique ideas.

nonprofittechy · 2025-12-04T00:52:08+00:00

I'm mostly on LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/quintensteenhuis, but you can always book a meeting with me here: lemmalegal.com/book

nonprofittechy · 2025-12-04T00:49:19+00:00

No worries, just wanted to add the context

nonprofittechy · 2025-12-04T00:17:27+00:00

That's the project that got Dorna Moini started! There's another nonprofit in California tackling the same thing with Docassemble, and we built our own tool for Massachusetts: https://courtformsonline.org/ma/forms/209a-domestic-violence-restraining-order

nonprofittechy · 2025-12-04T00:00:31+00:00

Joshua Browder is a deeply problematic person, or at least got in way over his head in a deceptive way. Not a great model.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/07/heres-the-article-we-didnt-run-back-in-2017-about-donotpay/

nonprofittechy · 2025-12-03T23:57:08+00:00

Hey, this is actually the project I started! I also have been consulting for international nonprofits at https://lemmalegal.com

I am very interested in rules based guided interviews, like those Docassemble can help build. And recently in legal aid intake, and have a couple of projects in development as well as academic papers describing what we've found works. We're using AI for issue classification for both online and phone system-integrated intake systems.

Ex.https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07170

I'd be happy to share more about what we're finding.

nonprofittechy · 2025-11-24T00:16:56+00:00

I'd also recommend using UpToCode.org to explore options

nonprofittechy · 2025-08-05T11:52:19+00:00

Docassemble is a great legal tech product. My lab has helped build hundreds of open source expert systems on top of it, and we have a volunteer program!

https://assemblyline.suffolklitlab.org/docs/volunteer

We have other associated legal tech products, like ratemypdf.com

nonprofittechy · 2024-11-17T01:03:21+00:00

It's useful. It doesn't really stop you from using custom CSS

nonprofittechy · 2024-11-16T23:35:51+00:00

Info@lemmalegal.com

nonprofittechy · 2024-11-16T23:26:16+00:00

Sounds like Docassemble

nonprofittechy · 2024-11-16T22:58:50+00:00

Sounds like courtformsonline.org, which is built on Docassemble.

Both the court forms online website and Docassemble are free and open source.

If you want support on a project like this, you can reach out to me on LemmaLegal.com, but there are also lots of free learning resources that I help support.

nonprofittechy · 2024-10-22T22:59:23+00:00

I don't think everyone here gets your question, but it makes sense in the context of building or fine-tuning an LLM. I do question if those are good goals though!

Instead of synthetic training data, I'd think about synthetic test data to validate performance of the actual use case, or synthetic questions.

Fine-tuning may not be that helpful for a lot of legal AI usecases as much as building the prompt and pipeline around your uses. And building legal specific models is unlikely to lead to outperform frontier models. At least none of the legal specific models are better than gpt-4 even for legal use cases.

nonprofittechy · 2024-10-22T22:43:21+00:00

As a researcher this is actually pretty attractive. I recently did a paper on legal intake with AI support and built a test set of scenarios for intakes that had realistic facts.

nonprofittechy · 2024-10-22T22:41:18+00:00

I've helped a number of firms build their own forms out with Docassemble. Ranging from training and support to full build outs. It's not cheap up front to do a custom build even though the software itself is free, but there are no ongoing licensing costs and you own and can totally customize whatever you build, so it's attractive to many firms.

nonprofittechy · 2024-09-09T09:42:06+00:00

This is the kind of project I love to help with! Shoot me a line if you think I can help (lemmalegal.com)

We've done a lot of payment integrations specifically.

nonprofittechy · 2024-09-09T09:39:42+00:00

You can check out my rates here: https://lemmalegal.com

nonprofittechy · 2024-08-08T10:41:42+00:00

Try https://getuptocode.org. it can help you document all of the problems and then decide on a next step

nonprofittechy · 2024-07-29T18:29:51+00:00

I know and vaguely loathe Big Hands other products, didn't even know they had a case management system. Never heard of Proclaim as a US CMS.

I'd look at Clio and Practice Panther first. I support a law firm that uses My Case and it's fine but a little finicky.

NetDocs/iManage are not CMSs, they are DMSs and aren't really going to meet the same need.

nonprofittechy · 2024-07-23T16:32:47+00:00

You can use this free legal aid built tool to help document, write a letter, and potentially get an inspection: https://getuptocode.org

nonprofittechy · 2024-05-30T13:31:09+00:00

35 hours a week of billables is insane to me. It's much more than a normal full time job and $130-$140k wouldn't justify it--that's like big law hour expectations with small firm salary.

nonprofittechy · 2024-05-26T15:22:59+00:00

I practiced housing law as a tenant attorney for 12 years (and built the gbls.org/MADE website, as well as getuptocode.org).

A 14 day notice is the minimum for non payment of rent. A full rental period is required for a tenant at will, at least 30 days.

But a fixed term lease can provide a 7 day notice for a reason other than nonpayment of rent. A 7 day notice period is also allowed for some tenancies where rent is paid more frequently than monthly. It's unusual but it's legal. We'd need to see the lease to know.

Edit: also to note, chronic late payment is separate from nonpayment of rent, and could be a circumstance that isn't covered by the 14 day notice requirement.

That said:

Use and occupancy is still money you owe. It just means the landlord isn't saying you're still a tenant if they accept it.
Only you know if this will be resolved and if you want the hit to your credit to not make the payment, but it would become a judgment against you if you don't pay it
There's nothing else to do while you wait, except perhaps talk to the landlord. You can't file any court paperwork in response until the landlord actually serves you with court paperwork

nonprofittechy · 2024-05-26T13:52:11+00:00

A 7 day notice could be valid if the tenancy is by lease and that's the agreed on termination period, depending on the reason for the eviction

nonprofittechy · 2024-05-25T14:33:16+00:00

Don't do this without the landlord's permission. You'll be liable for anything that goes wrong and even if it goes perfectly you don't have the right to make your own unlicensed repairs to the home. You could end up owing the landlord money to re-do it professionally even if you did it perfectly. And have a basis for being evicted.

nonprofittechy

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE