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>> law, technology, and the space between

All content by Kyle E. Mitchell, who is not your lawyer.

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Announcing Blackacre Labshave and belong to many readers

I’ve launched a new website, Blackacre Labs, where I’ll be posting more in-depth writing on law and technology. I’ll still blog topical thought pieces here, but if you’ve found my deeper posts interesting or useful, I think you’ll appreciate the new and different work I have in mind for Blackacre, too.

For those following along by RSS, the feed for the latest from Blackacre Labs is https://blackacrelabs.com/feed.xml. You can also opt into e-mails about new publications by logging in and visiting https://blackacrelabs.com/publications.

So what’s the plan? In short:

  1. Publish more primers, practical guides, forms, line-by-line reviews, and reference works that deserve to be improved and updated over time.

  2. Offer more software features for readers, beyond just a static blog.

  3. Better organize how I stay in touch with people who benefit from my work, so I can learn how to be of better service.

Why

It’s time to put two beliefs into action:

Considerate, reading people could, as a rule, do way more so-called legal work for themselves than they’re currently empowered to, if only they were given the right information, basis of confidence, and encouragement. For a lot of what people need, literacy really is the better part of legal competence. Not everyone will take the time to learn the law for any particular need, but requiring that a lawyer do it for every legal need isn’t working.

Second, traditional “lawyer belongs_to client” is a hard limit on how much good I can do. To really serve as I’m able, I need to do more broadcast, “has_and_belongs_to_many readers” kind of delivery. It’s not just “scaling up”. It’s a subtly different kind of work. In many ways, it’s harder.

Many clients clients have said kind things about how pleased or even relieved they’ve been with my somewhat unorthodox take on the style and substance of legal help. It’s time I took that spirit into the way I structure working relationships, too. It’s deeper than just billable hours versus “alternative fee arrangements”. The way lawyers work, and the way I’ve mostly worked so far, just isn’t how a lot of people need a lot of legal guidance delivered these days.

Material

So it’s time I followed the advice of so many clients, colleagues, mentors, and friends to double down on my writing. There are clearly a bunch of useful resources that should exist somewhere online, but don’t, that I’d enjoy creating. To pick a few off my list, just to give a sense:

I’ve launched Blackacre Labs with three examples to start:

Several more are already in some stage of planning or writing progress.

Business

Of course, one of the big takeaways here is that I’ll be charging for some of the new published work. That’s nothing terribly new there from my point of view. I make a living charging clients for forms, contract drafts, e-mail advice, and other writing. But I understand it will mark a change for those of you who’ve followed me only on this blog.

Some publications will cost money to access. These will work a bit like e-books, with online Web versions plus EPUBs and other formats to download. But the plan is for each purchase to include all later updates. I’m excited to bring more practices from software into legal publishing, like rigorous versioning, changelogs, automatic diffs, and content-aware algorithms for marking unchanged sections unread across versions. When someone takes the time to read what I’ve rewritten, something changes, and I update it, they should get a note that it’s been updated and a clear sense of how.

Other pieces won’t cost anything to read, but will require an account to access. I’ve no plans to harvest e-mails for marketing or other shenanigans on the back end here. Logging in also brings a bunch more features, like user interface for quick feedback, with costs on my end. But I hope this will encourage people to register, while keeping particular pieces out of the maw of the large language model monster. I’ve already seen some truly bizarre, uncanny-valley knockoffs of my writing on certain niche legal topics. It’s bad enough, and now predictable enough, that I need to exert some countervailing control.

Still, I’m sure there are and will be projects that I would rather see published as widely and openly as possible, and not just overdue updates of things I’ve already published to the open Web. While I won’t be pushing it for a time, I’ve already coded up a subscription model that gives access to all publications, as well as access to a mini message board for proposing, discussing, and ranking new projects for me to write. I’d be glad to earn the trust of some readers who’d care to fund public writing where it has a chance to improve the state of the game overall.

In the back of my mind, I am still thinking a lot about business models for cutting edge legal form drafting, too. Riffing on my Fast Path License, I’m sure I’ll get around to implementing an ability to publish legal forms so the terms are publicly accessible, but extras like line-by-line readings, usage guides, and interactive document assemblers cost. I’m looking forward to having a concrete platform as the obvious place to implement those ideas.

Features

As for that platform, I think the software side is also way overdue. Blogging with a static site generator helped me to focus on the writing, instead of twiddling with the publishing software or compulsively reorganizing metadata. But I’ve come to really feel the limitations.

I’ve long published and linked to some “living documents” and lists here on the blog, like this guide to types of lawyers and the Open Source Hype Antidote. For longstanding, updated docs like those, Blackacre already offers more of what I appreciate as a reader: RSS feeds for updates, EPUB downloads, version archives, a built-in way to track reading progress, common ideograms for aspects like depth of coverage and negotiating balance, and so on. Not to mention quick buttons to send comments on specific sections, including one-click canned comments like “this was confusing” or “typo here”.

I know what kind of software I’ve been dreaming of as a voracious online reader of many years. But I’m more interested to about the habits and preferences of you and other folks who’ve taken time to read my work over the years. Would it be useful to have a button to click to cut longer pieces into bit-sized chunks, and mail a segment every day? Should the site offer a built-in way to highlight text and save notes, or leave that up to users? Some kind of bite-sized newsletter?

I’m sure the best ideas haven’t occurred to me, and wouldn’t occur to me on my own. We all read and write a little differently. The important thing is that my writing helps who it’s supposed to help.

What to do Next

If the idea of more and better writing from me piques your interest, please know that I deeply appreciate it. I strongly encourage you to visit blackacrelabs.com, open an account, and poke around. I’ll see a notification of every signup. Forgive me if I’m tempted to e-mail you on the side. If you have thoughts to e-mail me, I will definitely read them.

I’ve been really encouraged by comments over the years about how useful this blog has been to others. My new challenge is to do better. What counts as better is up to readers like you.

Your thoughts and feedback are always welcome by e-mail.

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