Want to be a key contributor to making contracts easy to deal with, and maybe even fun?

8.5×14 Media, the company that runs LexPublica, aims to make it easier for creative professionals, entrepreneurs, small businesses and, eventually, average people to manage their legal affairs. We started by creating LexPublica, an initiative to provide a free, public resource of contract forms and legal knowledge, licensed under a Creative Commons attribution licence (like a Wikipedia for contracts). We’re now turning our attention to our first commercial product, an online workspace for simple contract management (think Basecamp for contracts). The workspace will solve problems small businesses and individuals encounter in dealing with the back-and-forth of negotiating contracts (like version control and redlining), as well as issues of organizing and keeping proper contract records.

We’re looking for a senior web applications developer who will be our technical anchor. You must have proven experience in designing, deploying and maintaining complex web applications. More than that, you must be stupendous at creating remarkable user experiences (we want to make contracts fun, remember?). You must also have experience with common open source application stacks and you must be able to communicate well, both orally and in writing, with technical and non-technical folks.

We have the usual idealistic approach of startups (we want to change the world for the better, and we think we can do it with your help) and fit with our team (a whopping three people) is critical. All three of us have previous entrepreneurial experience, have eclectic interests in addition to our keen interest in making legal stuff easier for people, and enjoy working with people who are smart and dedicated. We want someone who can thrive and grow professionally and personally on our team.

We’re an early stage venture, financed by a combination of funding from Bootup Labs and our own bootstrapping. We have no plans to raise significant outside capital until we have our product in the hands of real users. We have big plans for 8.5×14 and LexPublica and we’re going to need extraordinary people to turn these plans into reality. That said, the road ahead contains many obstacles and unknowns. The opportunity is great, but so is the risk. If thinking about this fact makes you excited, then we want to hear from you. Send an email to contact-at-lexpubli.ca, with your CV (ideally pointing us to your portfolio of work), and tell us about why you’d be a great addition to our team.

At this early stage, we’re hiring for a full-time four-month employment contract, but our hope is that the project will progress successfully and that a longer, more permanent relationship will grow out of our work together.

I’ve had my head buried in HTML and CSS code for the last couple of weeks and I’m very excited to be clawing my way back up into the world of words and sentences!

With the delightful help of Rachel from Gypsy Cab Designs, our website has a brand new look. Our goal for the redesign was twofold: to make the site friendlier and more approachable, and to make it easy to navigate. It’ll be a work in progress as we continue to smooth out some crinkles in the design and as we hear from visitors to the site who feel like telling us about their experience (read: we’d love to know what you think of it – what’s good, what’s confusing, what’s awful, what do you wish for?).

Big thanks, as well, to Dave Shea for our new logo.

Finally, we’ve just launched our email newsletter. Sign up for not-too-frequent updates on new contracts, projects we’re working on and things we’re thinking about.

All of this boils down to one very important thing: we’d like to be in touch with you. Drop us a note, won’t you?

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!

A week or so ago, Simon Fodden over at Slaw wrote a somewhat exasperated post about the generally poor state of URLs for accessing online statutes. At the end of the post he promised a part 2, in which he’d elaborate on other, more elegant ways to handle the problem.

The issue of usable URLs has been on our mind, as LexPublica must provide sane addresses for a large body of legal information that will span many languages, jurisdictions and types of content.

We think that people need three key things out of the URLs on LexPublica (and, likely, from any site that provides access to a large archive):

1. Convenience: it should be convenient to link to any document on LexPublica (including parts of that document, such as a particular section, clause or phrase).
2. Context: the URL of a LexPublica document should put it in a meaningful context. Take http://lexpubli.ca/english/canada/contract/confidentiality/simple/v1.0 as an example – a potential visitor can guess that they are dealing with a simple Canadian English-language confidentiality agreement.
3. Affordances: each part of a LexPublica URL should be an affordance – that is, a meaningful way to interact with LexPublica. People should be able explore LexPublica simply by making reasonable changes to a URL – as Ramsus^[1] puts it, “Content should be where people look for it.” URLs like http://lexpubli.ca/english/canada/contract/confidentiality/simple, http://lexpubli.ca/english/canada/contract/confidentiality, and http://lexpubli.ca/english/canada/contract should all return meaningful results. So should URLs like http://lexpubli.ca/contract or http://lexpubli.ca/confidentiality.

Convenience

The convenience issue is simple enough to solve – we can auto-generate a short, unique and stable URL for every document on the site. An auto-generated URL for a document would be a random-seeming jumble of 4 to 14 characters, perhaps like so:

http://lexpubli.ca/4pl8-n93f

A scheme like this would allow us to easily provide short URLs for billions^[2] of documents.

Addressing particular parts of a document could be accomplished through anchors and some simple, smart coding that can transform URLs like this:

http://lexpubli.ca/4pl8-n93f#s1.2.3:p1-p4

… into a reference to paragraphs 1 to 4 of section 1.2.3 of the given document. While this isn’t particularly human-readable, it makes for compact and convenient linking.

Context

Context is a tougher problem to solve, as it ventures into the hairy territory of legal information taxonomies. Putting a statute into its proper place in a hierarchy is one thing. Placing a more common piece of legal information, such as an employment agreement, is more difficult due to the sheer volume of employment agreements and the diversity of the information such an agreement might contain.

One solution is to recognize there are multiple relatively-simple taxonomies that a particular document can fit into.

For example (and without a great deal of thought on the exact URLs), the UK Transport Act of 1985 could be accessible via the following URLs:

One URL of the form /{jurisdiction}/{law-making body}/{legislation type}/{legislation name}/{year}. e.g.

http://lexpubli.ca/uk/parliament/ukpga/uk-transport-act/1985

Another URL of the form /{rfc4151 tag}. e.g.

http://lexpubli.ca/legislation.gov.uk,1985:ukpga/1985/67

Affordances

The last issue is making it so that people with different levels of legal and technical skill can easily wade through thousands of documents to find the right needle in the haystack.

While there are many parts to a solution for this issue, in the URL space we’ve adopted the view that documents should be where people look for them. This view implies that our URL system (and other parts of LexPublica that help organize information) must provide multiple ways of finding the same document. At the very least, we aim to cover the most common ways that people might seek to find a particular contract template or piece of legal information.

For example, if someone were to visit the URL http://lexpubli.ca/contract, the site should do its damnedest to provide them with a meaningful result. In this case, it might be an overview of what contracts are and how to find more contract information on LexPublica.

1. Rasmus Lerdorf, best known for inventing the PHP programming language and founding the online community around the language. [↩]
2. Some readers who’ve done the math may be thinking that 14 alphanumeric characters would give us a lot more than of billions of possible IDs. The number of possible IDs would be reduced by filtering dictionary words out of the IDs and by a few features to reduce input errors (such as optionally allowing hyphens every 4 characters) [↩]

As Martin and I have gone from planning to doing, we’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many people have wanted to help us get LexPublica up and running.

One of our most pleasant surprises has been Kim Werker, a polymath friend of mine from the craft, publishing and media industries. Friendly chats about what Kim and I were each up to led her to take a keen interest in LexPublica and to dive into a very hands-on role getting it up and running.

Kim has a broad range of skills that she will be using in many separate areas, from copywriting LexPublica’s introductory materials and bolstering our anemic web presence to tackling the more formidable task of leading work on the LexPublica Style Guide.

You’ll hear from her directly as she starts to blog and tweet about the Style Guide and other topics. She’s looking forward to getting to know our new and growing community, so don’t hesitate to introduce yourself.

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.

Contracts are a routine part of most of our lives.  If we’re running a business, we negotiate contracts regularly.  They affect our pocketbook very directly, and potentially the overall success and value of the business.  If we’re lawyers, we prepare and often negotiate contracts for our clients.

We’re building LexPublica because we think there’s a better way to create contracts for people, businesses and lawyers.  Simple, clear and plain language, for starters.  Developing more standardized contract templates for common agreements.  Making these contract templates available free of charge, for anyone to use.  Building an online community to facilitate collaboration in developing these contract templates.

We’ll have more to say as we get under way.  Tell us what you think.