mkyujung

Latch | Onsite - SF | SaaS, Legaltech, AI | https://www.latchapp.com/

Contract negotiation is the most time-consuming, costly, and difficult component of the contracting process, and is barely any easier now than when lawyers were using fax machines.

Large language models have unlocked the ability to solve many contract negotiation problems at scale. If you join us, you will be working with a small team to build a category-defining product that is rapidly embedding itself into the lives of its users.

Latch has raised from leading investors in an unannounced seed funding round; we've found product/market fit and are growing rapidly. We can share more details with candidates who go through our interview process.

Links here:

Software engineering role: https://jobs.polymer.co/latch/28962 Senior software engineering role: https://jobs.polymer.co/latch/28964

Otherwise, email me at [email protected] or shoot me a text/call at 415.231.8110 for questions! (I'm the co-founder / CEO)

Former lawyer here, though this isn't legal advice etc. This is really more of a commercial question. Launching first puts you at risk of taking on personal liability, but most very early-stage founders are comfortable with this because they have 0 or negligible users.

On the other hand, there's a lot of value to launching quickly, and IMO usually this benefit outweighs the risk of personal liability. I'd just try to make sure that your terms of service includes a limitation of liability / indemnity clause.

One underrated aspect of not incorporating is that it keeps your company feeling more like a "project" than a company. And I think it's worthwhile staying in this stage for as long as possible, because it gives you more permission to experiment with wild ideas and iterate in weird directions, even if, as in your case, you have a pretty solid idea of where you want to start already.

FWIW, I didn't bother incorporating my own startup until I'd secured terms for my first fundraising round.

Accord | Founding engineer | Auckland, New Zealand | Onsite https://accord.so/

Accord is a web app that helps startups build legal documents lightning-fast from free templates.

Accord handles then entire contract building process for users from beginning to end without them having to leave their browser tab. First, it helps startups generate contracts by asking a series of simple questions. Second, it allows users to edit their contracts through a rich-text editor. Third, it helps users sign their contracts and keep them stored and organized in their account dashboard. Eventually, I want users to be able to collaborate and negotiate their legal documents on Accord, as well as upload custom templates.

I want the process of building legal documents to be as fun and unintimidating as possible. This shouldn't be an arcane, "dark artsy" process. I think we can help companies become less reliant on legal service providers generally, which is an $800B+ industry.

I was a former lawyer at a leading New Zealand law firm. The product has launched and is making revenue.

I also recently raised a pre-seed round from Daniel Gross (investor in Uber, GitHub, SpaceX, CoinBase), and I'm recruiting a small team of engineers to take the product out of Beta and reach product/market fit. You can read the announcement here: https://accord.so/blog/seed

Accord is built on React, Next.js, Firebase and Tailwind CSS. Please send me an email at [email protected] if you'd like to know more!

Hey, FWIW I'm a former lawyer and I'm building a product that's meant for this exact use case.

I won't post a link here (to avoid self promotion), but if you're still looking for help I'm happy to give you a hand.

Accord | Founding engineer | Auckland, New Zealand | Onsite

https://accord.so/

Accord is a web app that helps startups build legal documents lightning-fast from free templates.

Accord handles then entire contract building process for users from beginning to end without them having to leave their browser tab. First, it helps startups generate contracts by asking a series of simple questions. Second, it allows users to edit their contracts through a rich-text editor. Third, it helps users sign their contracts and keep them stored and organized in their account dashboard. Eventually, I want users to be able to collaborate and negotiate their legal documents on Accord, as well as upload custom templates.

I want the process of building legal documents to be as fun and unintimidating as possible. This shouldn't be an arcane, "dark artsy" process. I think we can help companies become less reliant on legal service providers generally, which is an $800B+ industry.

I was a former lawyer at a leading New Zealand law firm, and I've built the entire product so far myself. I've launched a beta and have started making revenue.

I also recently raised a pre-seed round from Daniel Gross (investor in Uber, GitHub, SpaceX, CoinBase), and I'm recruiting a small team of engineers to take the product out of Beta and reach product/market fit. You can read the announcement here: https://accord.so/blog/seed

Accord is built on React, Next.js, Firebase and Tailwind CSS. Please send me an email at [email protected] if you'd like to know more!

Accord | Founding engineer | Auckland, New Zealand | https://accord.so/

Accord is a web app that helps startups build legal documents lightning-fast from free templates.

Accord handles then entire contract building process for users from beginning to end without them having to leave their browser tab. First, it helps startups generate contracts by asking a series of simple questions. Second, it allows users to edit their contracts through a rich-text editor. Third, it helps users sign their contracts and keep them stored and organized in their account dashboard.

I want the process of building legal documents to be as fun and unintimidating as possible. This shouldn't be an arcane, "dark artsy" process. I think we can help companies become less reliant on legal service providers generally, which is an $800B+ industry.

I was a former lawyer at a leading New Zealand law firm, and I've built the entire product so far myself. I've launched a beta and have just started onboarding my first paid users.

I also recently raised a seed round from Daniel Gross (investor in Uber, GitHub, SpaceX, CoinBase), and I'm recruiting a small team of engineers to take the product out of Beta and reach product/market fit. You can read the announcement here: https://accord.so/blog/seed

Accord is built on React, Next.js, Firebase and Tailwind CSS. Please send me an email at [email protected] if you'd like to know more!

I'm a corporate lawyer and I've written an essay on this[1]. Contracts have surprisingly similarities to code. This means: what if the process of drafting a contract was updated to be closer to the process of building software? Definitely an opportunity here IMO.

[1]mkjung.com/contracts

My argument isn't that contracts will be converted to code, but that contracts share similarities to code, and therefore the way contracts are written could resemble the way computer programs are written in the future.

Right now I’m working on a 100 page due diligence report. Even if I’m doing a simple task like proofreading, I have to mark up my changes by hand and wait for the document to become available to access because an associate is making edits to a single page of the report. To make things worse, once we finish our draft, we’ll send this document to our clients, the investment bankers, and the auditors to review and send us 3 different versions of markups. Meanwhile we’ll be continuously updating the document ourselves.

Often it becomes unclear who has edited what and when, and its exacerbated by the fact that many lawyers still prefer to mark-up documents with pen and paper and have them updated later by their secretary (while in the meantime the document will have gone through another round of markups from other lawyers in the team).

I don’t know if an automatic merge is the right solution either, but I can absolutely see the value in software that helps manage this mess. I realise it might be different in litigation, because in this case we’re not trying to draft a coherent legal argument but tick off a series of regulatory checkboxes that are semi-independent from each other.

For what it’s worth, I agree. I’m a junior lawyer at a big corporate law firm in NZ and it’s incredible that we don’t have anything resembling Github or meaningful source control.

If a small team of developers were to build a simple web app the way lawyers draft legal documents, it would look like this:

1. Developer 1 writes up the initial JS, CSS, and HTML files and emails them as an attachment to Developer 2.

2. Developer 2 prints out the files, edits them via hand markups, sends the printouts to his secretary to mark up electronically, and then emails the files to Developer 3.

3. Developer 3 repeats step 2 but emails the files back to Developer 1.

4. During this whole process, while one developer is working on the app, the other developers are waiting idly - even if they could be working on a separate part of the app with no risk of conflict.

This is a simplified explanation and lawyers will have some degree of version control internally through software like i-manage, but I find it hard to believe this process couldn't be improved significantly. I’ve been seriously considering starting a company in this space.