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.

On July 7th, 2009 (which is today, as this post is being written) we’ll be delivering a 30 second pitch to a small crowd at DemoCamp Vancouver. If we successfully woo the assembled collection of bloggers, startup junkies and technologists, we’ll win one of the six-minute presentation slots in which we can elaborate.

Update: We did win one of the presentation slots, giving our little presentation to about 120 people.

The draft script for our 30-second pitch is:

Who here can afford a lawyer?

(Waiting for hands to lift and presuming that it won’t be many. Update: About 4 people from the crowd of 120  tentatively lifted their hands.)

That’s an indication of a really serious problem. No one can afford lawyers. Not individuals, not professionals, not small businesses. Not even lawyers can afford lawyers.

LexPublica is here to solve that problem.

Vote for us and we’ll tell you how we’re going to open source the law, save the world and make money at the same time.

The draft script for our six-minute presentation is:

Hi! I’m Martin, and I’m a lawyer.

and I’m Zak. I’m not a lawyer.

We’re both from LexPublica, a project to open source the law, save the world and make a bunch of money.

The law is a huge topic. A search for the word “legal” on Google returns about 790,000,000 results. To put that in perspective, a search for sex returns about 750,000,000 results. Our obsession with legal matters now seems to have outstripped our obsession with sex.

This is a reflection of the crying need for access to legal help. No one can afford lawyers. Individuals, professionals and small businesses can’t afford lawyers. Startups can’t afford lawyers. Big companies with large budgets for legal services can’t afford lawyers. Even lawyers complain, in all earnestness, that they can’t afford lawyers.

LexPublica aims to solve this problem by opening up the world of legal knowledge to everyone.

The first practical step we’ll take is to make common contracts available free of charge. These will include things that most of us need, such as employment agreements, website development agreements and non-disclosure agreements (NDA’s for short). The contracts will be written in plain English and have supporting guides to help you use them properly.

Along with the contracts, we’ll provide other information about contracts and the law to help you make informed decisions. With that, you can also make a better decision about when you want do prepare a contract yourself and when you want to get a lawyer.

Take a non-disclosure agreement as an example.

When you get an NDA sent to you, and you’re uncomfortable signing it (because it looks one-sided), you’ll be able to come to LexPublica and get background info on typical provisions in NDA’s and what they mean.

LexPublica will give you the understanding to go back to the other party and negotiate better wording for the NDA (or send them a copy of LexPublica’s standard NDA).

If instead you’re the one who needs to send the NDA, you’ll be able to come to the LexPublica website to get that. You can choose a simple NDA for simple deals and a more detailed NDA’s for more complex deals. A guide to NDAs will help you what is appropriate.

No more one-sided contracts.  No more being at the mercy of someone else’s contract because you can’t afford a lawyer.

With LexPublica, you’ll have the benefit of open source law, putting control of your legal life back in your hands.

Tackling an enterprise of this magnitude requires a team bigger than just the two of us. LexPublica will need to be a global online community of lawyers and non-lawyers working together to create a global legal commons.

Wikipedia, Linux and other similar projects provide successful and similarly size examples for us to follow.

So far, we’ve told you about LexPublica, and how we’re giving stuff away for free.

What we haven’t yet told you yet is how we’re going to make money.

There’s a commercial twin to LexPublica, called 8.5×14 (named after legal size paper).  It will provide wide range of commercial services, both for lawyers and for people who need legal services. These services will be build around LexPublica’s open content and open APIs.

For example, imagine an online workspace to manage your business’s standard contract templates, your contract negotiations and your dealings with your lawyer. The service is simple contract management, something like the Basecamp project management web service, but for contracts and negotiations.

So if you’re the person in your company who deals with contracts and the paperwork that goes along with it, you’ll be able to do that faster and more efficiently.  Instead of emailing versions of contracts in Microsoft Word back and forth with your customers (and with you lawyer too, if you’re using lawyer), and losing track of who’s got the most up-to-date version and who made what changes, you’ll have the online workspace  – again like Basecamp – to manage that process and to manage the evolving versions with proper change tracking. You can get the deal done faster, with less headache.

Intrigued? We hope so.

We’d like you to help LexPublica in two ways:

1. Tell us your problems with contracts and getting legal help.
2. Spread the word about our blog.

You can catch us here tonight, or drop us by email.

You can also keep up to date with our blog, and watch for our alpha release at the end of August.

In Light Your Taper, we talked about freely sharing our ideas and plans. Beyond writing publicly about them, there’s another important component to sharing freely: letting others use and build on your work.

Applying these principles to our blog, we’ve chosen to license our writings under the Creative Commons Attribution License. In essence, the licence means anyone can use our blog content for any purpose — commercial or non-commercial — so long as they give us credit.

This choice of a very permissive licence helps us share what LexPublica is working on, as widely as possible. Spreading the word about LexPublica is valuable to us, increasing our visibility and helping us find collaborators. The permissive licensing is also intended to enable others to leverage this content, adapt to their own purposes, and re-publish it.

In a future post, we’ll write about our thinking on the choice of licensing for LexPublica’s free contract templates and free information on how to use those templates. Quick preview: we’re inclined to use the same Creative Commons Attribution License. We’d love to hear from you if you have any views or comments on that.

The free exchange of ideas and information is the lifeblood of healthy societies and vibrant markets. As Jefferson framed it:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

We want to take that principle a step further, and apply it to our new enterprise, LexPublica. We’ll share openly what is often considered confidential: our vision, our ideas, our plans, our thinking on key decisions and our experience. By doing this, we want to engage others in our work, we want others to learn from our experience, and we want to benefit from input and feedback.