2/3/2024
Legal Wizards💡
Version: 1.2 [Alpha]
'Replacing Lawyers with Logic ➲ The Blue Ocean Opportunity in the Legal Profession'.
As this project is very much a work in progress, your feedback and comments for improvement, as always, are greatly appreciated!
If you are interested in reading the completed book, please contact us to order a pre-release copy.
🌊 The Blue Ocean Opportunity ➲ Lawyers walking Planks!
⭐️ This book is a program written in a language called Pollen
💡 What is Authentic8℠ / Genuin℠?
Chapter 1️⃣ Leap Frog ➲ Building upon [68+] Blog Articles
Chapter 2️⃣ What is Blue Ocean Strategy and how does it apply to the Legal Profession?
Chapter 3️⃣ Can your law firm be trusted? ➲ Getting the Basics Right [Privacy & CyberSecurity]
Chapter 4️⃣ Building Lawyer Logic Skills ➲ Learning to Code in Python & Racket
Chapter 5️⃣ Expanding beyond Legal Jurisdictional Limits via Collaboration
Chapter 6️⃣ Titan Lawyer [Private AI] with Pre-Optimised Prompts
Chapter 7️⃣ Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast!
Way back when I started BLUEOCEAN.law in 2017, I identified the 'Blue Ocean' opportunity in the legal profession.
I researched the reasons why 70%+ of the general population avoided using the legal profession, made lots of observations & notes and started work on formulating solutions.
Fast forward to 2024, and we have built a [700+] page website focused on replacing lawyers (where it makes sense to do so) with Lawyer Logic by providing Legal Wizards, TITAN Lawyer [Private AI], Legal Quizzes & [350+] Self-Service Smart Legal Documents, as well as much more.
There still remains a ton of work to be done on our side to deliver on my vision for the future digital delivery of legal services.
Whilst we have early adopters raving about the quality and affordability of what we have to offer, we have not yet reached a tipping point where we can expect mainstream adoption to take off.
Our goal is to work to find the magic formula that will help us find mainstream adoption [without the need for a massive marketing budget], so that we start going viral!.
It is hoped that this book (when it has been completed) will work as designed and play a major part in helping to spread the word and build momentum.
In order to seize the 'Blue Ocean' opportunity, we need to use our leading position to unleash a tsunami of scalability, speed, quality, 24/7/365 availability and value that is able to be delivered by embedding Lawyer Logic into legal products.
This book articulates a way forward, a call to action for lawyers to join our crew or start collaborating with us to build legal products with embedded Lawyer Logic to enable the future digital delivery of legal services.
It will discuss the business model, resourcing & mindset changes that I think will be required as part of fostering the necessary culture and starting to build a roadmap of the skills required for the development & delivery of 'value innovation' by the legal profession.
This discussion will extend to how we can best encourage adoption by existing clients as well as the general public (existing non-clients): enabling non-disruptive change whilst improving both the enjoyment and work/life balance of both lawyers and clients globally.
If lawyers don't step up to this challenge, we will face an increasingly bitter regulatory legal battle with legal tech providers who will be more then willing take over the market for themselves.
In other words, if we are not part of the solution, the legal profession itself will be disrupted.
This is already starting to happen with legal technology providers primarily leading the way, with the only protective barrier being the longstanding self-regulating regulations that currently prevent anyone other than a lawyer from providing legal advice and assistance.
If lawyers think they are safe, they need to think again!
Taxi drivers also thought they were safe. But, we all know what happened when Uber rallied their riders to sign petitions for the politicians who quickly buckled under the weight of the votes they stood to lose if they didn't deliver on the clear mandate from the public.
We all need to start by assuming that the all or some of the protections the legal profession take for granted may soon no longer apply.
I have coined the term 'Lawyer Logic' as shorthand for the longer term Embedded Lawyer Logic, which is the smart 'if/then/else' logic built (i.e., embedded) into the next generation of automated Smart Legal Documents and Legal Products.
The legal documents that have been and are still mainly available online are '1-size-fits-all' legal templates, often given away for free (in the knowledge that they are not actually fit-for-purpose) and definitely require legal review based on individual circumstances before they can be safely used.
Although they should, they generally do not carry any 'warning label' such as:
'Caution: Not to be used or signed without the supervision of your lawyer'.
For this reason, lawyers have historically either ignored and not paid much attention to these cheap and dangerous legal templates, or rightly warned their clients away from using them.
For many law firms these basic legal templates have been the source of new clients and revenue via expensive dispute resolution and litigation work as the legal templates inevitably operate as 'time bombs' waiting to explode as they are either based on mislaid assumptions or fail to deliver on important legal compliance requirements.
As legal document automation technology has matured, the speed and sophistication of Lawyer Logic that can now be embedded into each legal document has made it possible for a lawyer-quality legal agreement to be drafted without the involvement of a lawyer.
Think of this as the equivalent of a driverless train, truck, bus, car or taxi.
Designing & building a next generation Smart Legal Document requires input and guidance from the best lawyers in the relevant area of law.
Before a next generation Smart Legal Document is launched to the growing Australian legal community of [1,100+] lawyers and the general public for Self-Service, Lawyer-Assisted or Full Service options, it MUST first be rigorously tested to ensure it meets exacting standards and covers the majority of circumstances that generally apply when the specific type of legal agreement is drafted.
At any stage in the process, a lawyer can "clone" i.e., copy the entire legal document as well as the answers provided by a client, and make changes to the new version of the document so that the Smart Legal Document can be quickly regenerated and resent to the client for their review and feedback.
By way of example, we offer a Free Simple Australian Will that can be completed at anytime you like: in the comfort of your own home, or in fact, anywhere you have an internet connection.
You can even use your mobile phone (if required).
If you are unsure at any point in the process, you can contact us to upgrade the service to Lawyer-Assisted (which allows you to obtain legal assistance for a limited time) or Full-Service (which converts the process into a traditional time-based legal matter where the lawyer takes charge of the task).
As with all next generation Smart Legal Documents, the final legal document can vary in a multitude of ways depending on the answers you provide.
For example, using embedded Lawyer Logic, it is possible for an entire legal agreement to be capable of being instantly regenerated so that it is drafted in favour of one party over the other, depending on the negotiating power they wield, or to be drafted on a neutral footing to speed up the negotiation process so that a deal can be reached more quickly.
In the estate planning context, it is the same as being requested to provide answers to the standard questions asked by a competent estate planning lawyer.
Your responses are then used to both determine what additional questions need to be asked, and to adapt the content of the Will so that is automatically generated to meet your requirements.
All of this assumes that you know what you are doing, you have legal mental capacity, your estate is small, you are not cutting anyone out of your Will and that having a Will is better than not having one at all, and lastly that your estate is so simple that it does not require or would not greatly benefit from the expensive time and oversight of an estate planning lawyer.
Many times these assumptions hold true.
But what if they don't?
In order to deal with situations where the situation may not be so straightforward or assistance is required to decide which legal document or documents are the right ones, another higher level of Lawyer Logic is required.
We have addressed this need by designing and building what we call Legal Wizards.
By way of example, we offer 3 kinds of Free Legal Heath Check that can be completed at anytime you like: in the comfort of your own home, or in fact, anywhere you have an internet connection.
When you select the Self-Service option, the results are instantly generated and emailed to you.
You can even use your mobile phone (if required).
Our Legal Wizards can help you determine whether or not the situation is one that definitely requires legal oversight.
There is always the risk that even a Smart Legal Document will miss an important legal aspect, or that you are actually using the wrong legal document/s in your circumstances.
Therefore, even if you use a Smart Legal Document Generator to create a draft legal document, you will still need to make a commercial decision whether or not to seek legal review.
Our Legal Quizzes are designed to help you building your understanding of legal matters, as well as to help with what we commonly see needs to be done: Legal Myth Busting. This need often arises due to the law changing or to a legal drama applying law in different way to how the law is applied to the contract or where you live.
We already offer access to provide submissions to Titan Lawyer {Private AI] which has been built with pre-optimized prompts to generate better results faster.
Here Lawyer Logic is involved in ensuring both quality inputs and in the training of the AI model.
When high-quality Lawyer Logic is embedded into expert Legal Wizards, Legal Quizzes, Private AI systems and Smart Automated Legal Document generation which is made available online for the general public, then high-volume routine low-risk situations as well as assumption or myth busting can be effectively dealt at scale, with without the intervention of a lawyer.
This is, in essence the core of the Blue Ocean Opportunity.
The huge 70%+ of the market who were never going to consult a lawyer anyway, plus a compellingly large share of the remaining 30% of the market who will no longer need to engage a lawyer to assist.
Complex circumstances will continue to arise:
⚖️ High-risk/value deals;
⚖️ Emerging areas of law;
⚖️ Legal complexities to navigate; as well as for example
⚖️ People who want to exclude family members from their will, and much more ...
Well not yet, but that is the intention.
A book-publishing system written in Racket.
It is intended to write this book using the same software Matthew Butterick used to publish & maintain his web-based books Beautiful Racket, Practical Typography, and Typography for Lawyers.
If you think documents should be programmable, you’ll love it.
If not, you can move along.
Pollen gives you access to a full programming language (Racket) with a text-based syntax that makes it easy to embed code within your documents.
Official forum: https://forums.matthewbutterick.com/c/pollen/
Further Reading: Github - Pollen
Our ability to distinguish the real or genuine from the onslaught of AI-generated reproductions and deep fakes is in decline.
We need simple cost-effective solutions that work seamlessly... to help us quickly Authentic8℠!
Authentic8℠ / Geniun℠ is a Blue Ocean Law Group designed & backed image + legal document verification solution making it both free and easy for you to verify using unique Authentic8℠ / Geniun℠ QR Code that has been added to:
🔒 Your Blue Ocean Law Group legal document (for example, a Non-Disclosure/Confidentiality Agreement); or
🔒 Your social media profile image.
My original thinking was that rather than attempting to write my first book from scratch, I could try to "leap frog" ahead by incorporating any relevant blog articles I have already written.
I would then be in a position where I might be much more likely to complete the book.
This approach aligns with both the concepts of not trying to re-invent the wheel, and object-oriented coding which increases efficiency and reduces complexity via coding objects which can be reused many times.
The problem then becomes, deciding which blog articles to include?
No easy task, given that as of the date of writing this first draft we had [67+] blog articles.
In charting this path, I was inspired by my recently acquired knowledge of the random function in Python, as well as seeing the very same idea implemented on the indieblog.page website.
Rather than manually selecting blog article for inclusion in my book, I decided to undertake a self-challenge project to see if I could code a button to randomly redirect users to any one of our [68+] blog articles.
If successful, introducing randomness would help me avoid having to pick and chose which blog articles to include or exclude.
I would also be able to continue to add more content to the random redirect button (as it doesn't need to be limited to blog articles).
Theoretically, I could add anything with a URL, including content from other parts of the website, quizzes, FAQ, legal wizards, external blogs, etc.
This would improve the user experience by adding some fun, making the process of deciding where to go next, simpler & more interesting at the same time.
This challenge project has ignited the kernel of an idea to recreate our huge database of curated Legal & Corporate Governance (incl. Blue Ocean Strategy®) links that were lost when fyi.to ceased operations in late 2023.
Even though the direct links themselves no longer work, the majority of the Smart Lists we created have been preserved and are still accessible via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
By way of example, here is the archived link to our popular Master Smart List.
All of our archived links could be added into a larger database comprising thousands of curated legal links to enhance the scope of a randomised legal link experience.
This kind of approach adopts Blue Ocean Strategy® thinking called Value Innovation.
It doesn't cost any more to change the user experience to deliver the same content in new and interesting ways.
Thus, enhancing value without increasing the cost to deliver it!
In a world where an algorithm based on information about your location and preferences increasingly decides what appears in your newsfeed, it can be difficult to break outside of your traditional thinking patterns to expand your outlook and perspective.
More than ever, we need to reintroduce the "stumble upon" kind of experience that made the internet a wondrous place, where an element of fun & discovery can operate to deliver unexpected content that might also serve as pattern interrupts to prompt us to reconsider our perspectives.
My personal experience tends towards the idea that this approach typically leading to new insights and learning.
By introducing total randomness, my intention is to surprise you by directing you to one of our blog articles you may not have otherwise taken the time to scroll down the webpage far enough to read, or may not have applied the necessary filters that would have brought the blog article into your "field of attention".
Surprisingly, it didn't take very long to write & test a working Python program in my desktop/laptop development environment.
The program randomly selects and opens my browser to one of our [68+] blog articles.
Each time I run the program, I am pleasantly surprised by both how quickly the decision is made (which blog article to present) as well as by the total randomness of the result.
If you are a developer, you can cut and paste the Python code directly from the following blog article I wrote to share my experience:
Fun with Python ➲ Randomly Delivering our [68+] Lawyer Logic Blog Articles
My next self-challenge was to somehow migrate the Python code into this webpage so that the button can be used by anyone.
I successfully completed this self-challenge (with a lot of help from Connor James and AI).
My html code has been embedded in the button below.
After you have finished reading, navigate back to this page to click the button again for more discoveries!
Did you have fun, or learn anything new?
Please let me know about your experience in the comments section at the bottom of this blog article.
If you found value in the randomness, we have cloned the process so that you can now do a discovery deep dive into the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to find the valuable and interesting curated links (most of them still work) within of our [87+] Archived Smart Lists [2018-2023].
Our Smart Lists included topics such as Space Law, Conversational Commerce, Legal Design, Pro Bono, Blockchain, Curated Reading Lists, Legal Business Podcasts, etc. (now archived) which were taken offline in late 2023 when the platform provider fyi.to folded.
Discovery Deep Dive ➲ Randomly Surf our [87+] Archived Smart Lists [2018 - 2023]
To demonstrate how we have applied Blue Ocean Strategy® to our law firm we will use the Blue Ocean Strategy® tool called the Strategy Canvas, which looks like the following:
The plan to show & compare the Traditional Legal Strategy Canvas v. the Blue Ocean Law Group Strategy Canvas.
Zen-Like “Peace of Mind” ➲ Legal Wizard Health Check
Blue Ocean Law Firm is now a Reality ➲ A decade on …
How Blue Ocean Law Group help you protect your Privacy & Trade Secrets
⭐️ New blog article to be written.
⭐️ New blog article to be written.
When Lawyer Logic has already been developed and refined within one legal jurisdiction, there exists an inherent opportunity to collaborate with lawyers in other legal jurisdictions to identify the key differences so that the work already completed can be slightly or moderately modified so that its coverage can be extended.
Proposed collaboration with Connor James.
Proposed collaboration with Andrew Nelson.
In sum, ...
Social Sharing Image: Photo courtesy of Christian Holzinger on Unsplash
Credits: This blog article was written by James D. Ford Esq., GAICD CIPP/US CC | Attorney-at-Law, Blue Ocean Law Group℠.
State of California Bar Number: 346590
Important Notice:
This blog article is intended for general interest + information only.
It is not legal advice, nor should it be relied upon or used as such.
We recommend you always consult a lawyer for legal advice specifically tailored to your needs & circumstances.
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