zarekr's comments

Crafting software is a trade, not a profession. I say this without disrespecting either, because I do both myself (qualified lawyer, software dev)

A profession at the very least has a central governing body that is regulated and hands out certificates that have an inherent value because they enable the holder to do something that is typically restricted unless you hold it: law, medicine, accountancy.

The certificates you speak of are typically designed by commercial entities that are usually there to make money off people through education rather than regulate and control how their services are delivered.

So are they worthwhile in the real world? IMO no, someone who can demonstrate their ability to apply their skills as a dev in order to solve my business needs is much more attractive than someone who’s completed a course about how to use LangChain but hasn’t got a clue how to apply that to a real world problem.

For your bonus q, I can only speak to my own experience, but even holding an LLM in corporate tax from King’s College London was not a significant enough advantage when I was applying to become a lawyer 20 years ago - the firms wanted people with commercial knowledge and practical experience then, and I doubt anything has changed now - whether for law firms or software companies.

Typst is really good for this. The syntax takes a little bit of getting used to but on the whole I’ve had a lot of success producing contracts and other legal documents with it. I tend to assemble the input files using a templating engine and then use the compiler in a subprocess. The compiler is very fast and the development is pretty active. The output is much easier to manage than with packages like reportlab.

I had a client doing this in 2016. It was ancillary to their main business which was matching movers with homeowners. They eventually pivoted into an insurtech offering using computer vision models to do what you’re suggesting, collecting the data at the point of moving by using the movers to do the “heavy lifting” of scanning the items. They ended up being insurance intermediaries before folding so I’m not sure how valuable the idea is. Maybe things are different now.

This is a way to run open source models locally. You need the right hardware but it is a very efficient way to experiment with the newest models, fine tuning etc. ChatGPT uses massive model which are not practical to run on your own hardware. Privacy is also an issue for many people, particularly enterprise.

I was a lawyer advising startups. The biggest issue with platforms that try to connect the two groups is that it becomes a race to the bottom. Startups using services like the one you are proposing typically base their decision on who to use almost entirely on price. This is never good for the lawyer who (speaking for myself only) wants to provide a good service, build a relationship and get to know the person and their motivations in order to properly understand their problems and advise them.

There is no decent solution in Python and I’ve had the same experience with HTML as you, even using Weasyprint (which is the most popular solution for this). Instead I have been using typst (the rust based CLI). There is a Python library that provides bindings or you can run a subprocess to generate the files. It only takes a day or two to get to grips with the typst model and then you can write functions to produce consistent looking pdf files very quickly and with far less overhead than using headless chrome (ie. Playwright or puppeteer).

Cap table info should be considered confidential information that is the property of the company and protected in the same way. I don’t really understand how this “privacy agreement” would apply or be enforced or even who the parties to it would be. It’s down to the company to assess what the privacy policy of any third party service (whether that is saas or an accountant or a lawyer) designed to take over cap table duties, and be confident that that third party will treat their confidential info properly - and have some recourse in the event that they do not.

The most effective terms of service need to deal with the specifics of what your business does - in other words, the core domain.

In the context of a typical startup, terms of service are essentially contracts between your business and your users, and there is a typical format for these types of contract. Most will start with an explanation of who the parties to the contract are and the defined terms that will be used throughout.

The main commercial terms come next - these are the ones that should deal with the specifics of your core domain. An effective lawyer should be discussing your business with you in depth to understand what it does, and to identify what (if any) legal rules will apply to it. For example, a startup selling travel policies in the UK may need to comply with ABTA requirements, whereas one selling directly to consumers (rather than to other businesses) would need to comply with any consumer contract regulations. Outside of specific legal requirements your lawyer should also consider how your business operates and the point at which liability might arise and how it could be mitigated. Looking at the startup from your profile, I would want to delve into topics such as “what happens if a comment is not recorded or displayed properly and this has consequences for the rest of the team” or “how do you maintain confidential information while sharing comments amongst users” etc.

The remainder of the terms need to deal with the general obligations that a company and user might have to one another (again using your startup - how and when is payment? What happens if payment is late? How long do you retain deleted account data?). There is also a bunch of more general contract law stuff which is often included (region dependant) which deals with issues like “where are disputes heard?” (the ‘jurisdiction’ clause) and “what happens if we don’t do something we said we will do on our terms?” (the ‘no waiver’ clause). This is commonly known as boilerplate and is often overlooked, sometimes with dire consequences.

It’s unfortunate but true that many lawyers will take on the job of drafting terms without even understanding the above separation of concerns and instead dish out a template which only really deals with parts 1 (who) and part 3 (general stuff). The real value of engaging a lawyer lies with complex domains (finance, IP, consumers). Your startup seems fairly straightforward and low risk to me and there is no reason you cannot draft a set of terms yourself to get going. I suggest looking at a few similar sites - not to copy but to understand how they do things and to then try and write your own using similar principles to those above. Probably the same way you read open source code to see how others do what they do.

For a simple comparison, consider this - terms of service are kind of like CRUD apps. There’s a server, a user, a bunch of boilerplate (auth, create, read, upload, delete) and then hopefully some detailed business logic which actually does something useful.