Yesterday morning I went on CBC Radio’s Early Edition with Rick Cluff for a conversation about LexPublica.

As always happens, I left the interview thinking about some points I wish I’d mentioned. Here’s a clip of the conversation (provided by CBC) and here are the top points I would add:

1. In essence, LexPublica is similar to Wikipedia for contracts and law. While our initial focus is on simple contracts for small businesses, our vision is to become the reference source for contracts and legal knowledge.
2. Millions of people already handle their own contracts and legal affairs without the benefit of any decent information on the topic. LexPublica isn’t a substitute for a lawyer. Rather, LexPublica fills a gap in legal help for small businesses who want to understand a contract issue and may choose to handle the contract themselves – or in some cases, may conclude that they do wish to retain a lawyer (for example, because a legal matter is more complex than they had anticipated).
3. In addition to providing users with background legal information for contracts, LexPublica provides other indicators that help non-lawyers assess whether to trust LexPublica and to decide whether a contract is right for them. For example, our community of lawyer and non-lawyer participants uses a structured process to create contracts, with that work being open and visible to the public. In addition, we will be providing a revision history of contracts, so users can see the evolution of a particular contract. We believe this open approach to contract creation offers valuable context in making a choice about the suitability of a contract.

Welcome, CBC Radio listeners!

Please peruse this blog to get a feel for the things we’re thinking about as we get LexPublica up and running (the main site looks a lot different from the blog – we’re working on a redesign). You can learn more about LexPublica by reading what LexPublica is and what our goals are, reviewing our contract development process, and seeing if we’ve already answered your question. We’re evolving rapidly; keep track of our progress by subscribing to our blog feed and by following us on Twitter.

We’re very interested to learn more about how you think you might use LexPublica contracts, what kinds of contracts you’re most interested in, and of course we welcome any questions you have. Don’t be shy!

Banksy on Thames bank, by coda

Last week, Tresa Baldas of The National Law Journal wrote on the Legal Technology blog at Law.com about companies and law firms that block access to social networking sites. For some kinds of companies, I might buy the argument that this is a good idea. At companies where employees base their work on relationships and services rendered or in any way interact with the public, however, this is just wrongheaded. Here’s a quote from the end of the article that sums up why companies do such a thing:

Lawyers say the bans are due to a number of factors, including loss of productivity, data theft fears, liability risks if online comments turn up in lawsuits and corporate image concerns.

“I think what’s happening is social media is starting to simmer, and the lawyers and the PR teams, the HR teams and marketing teams are realizing there are all these problems,” said Gaida Zirkelbach, an associate at Gunster who focuses on technology and the Internet.

Let’s go point for point, shall we?

1. Loss of productivity. Companies fear employees will spend hours chatting with old high school friends on Facebook instead of doing their work. Reality: If you employ people who so undervalue doing their work, that’s because you made bad hiring decisions or maybe it’s a problem with your management style. By prohibiting access to sites that allow employees to connect with people beyond the walls of your offices, you prevent them from promoting your services and your brand by being the awesome and helpful people they are (and you know they’re awesome and helpful because you hired them, right?).
2. Data theft fears. What how? I don’t understand this one. If the fear is really that employees might say something they shouldn’t, thus revealing “data” that should only be known internally, you should also prevent them from attending parties, going home to a partner and using their telephone both in and out of the office. Yes, posting something online creates a record of it. Sure. So don’t say anything online you wouldn’t say in email.
3. Liability risks if online comments turn up in lawsuits. See #2 above re: email.
4. Corporate image concerns. People might say bad stuff about your company online. The thing is, though, that corporate image is increasingly affected by how customers feel about their interactions with you. Cut off those interactions and see what happens to your corporate image. Flipping that around, see how Zappos, Jet Blue, and Comcast have used social media to tremendous benefit.
5. “There are all these problems.” Scratch that, reverse it.

There are all these opportunities.

Don’t dismiss them just because you don’t want to spend the energy exploring them.

(Note: Kevin O’Keefe wrote about his own good reasons for scoffing at companies’ banning access to social networking sites.)

Shh, by Kradlum

This week we’re focusing on preparing our first contract. It’s a confidentiality agreement, also known as a non-disclosure agreement or NDA. We’ve decided to call it the former, since confidentiality is at the heart of it and it covers important things other than disclosure, such as restrictions on use of confidential information. And it’s a good first agreement for us to publish because it’s relatively straightforward and parts of it will likely find their way into other, more complex agreements we’ll work on down the line.

The first step we take in creating a new type of agreement is to work up a blueprint that covers the major considerations for all agreements of that type. The blueprint is a high-level outline that’s general enough to apply to all the confidentiality agreements our participants will produce, and specific enough to be a good first step toward developing the drafting instructions for a particular agreement. For example, the agreement we’re working on now is a simple mutual confidentiality agreement, and it’s likely that in the not-too-distant future we’ll also create a simple one-way confidentiality agreement. The blueprint outlines both, but the drafting instructions for each will be different, as necessitated by the different requirements of mutual versus one-way confidentiality.

We’ve posted the blueprint, which is very much a living document, and we’ll post the rest of our work as it progresses.

If you use, or anticipate someday needing to use, confidentiality agreements, what types of requirements do you commonly have? What situations have you encountered where you’ve needed a confidentiality agreement or have been asked to sign one? If this is something you’d prefer not to comment on publicly, you can email me. We’ll keep your comments in mind as we continue to flesh out the blueprint and plan future contracts.

—
(Apologies to RSS subscribers for this duplicate post. Believe it or not, I accidentally deleted the original post and had to recreate it.)