Martin and Zak had the pleasure of presenting to a group of lawyers at Davis LLP this afternoon; it was their first time addressing a roomful of lawyers about online communication tools and we thought we’d share the slides and notes we prepared.

In general, we focused on two major points:

• The internet is about relationships between people – something lawyers are already very good at developing
• The ways to build and maintain those relationships can feel very different online and it’s important to develop comfort with them now, when there’s room to make mistakes and learn and before it becomes an essential part of lawyering over the next five years or so

Here are the slides we used. After the jump, we’ve posted the presentation notes.

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.