Want to see what the @lawgives engineers have been up to in the past couple of months? Using the open source tool gource, we’ve visualized the progress of our code base over time. Every dot you see is a file, and every cluster a folder.
It’s just one example of the powerful open tools that are available on the Internet today. We hope you’ll enjoy this video!
Because we’re LawGives, we couldn’t help mentioning that gource is licensed under GNU GPL v3.
A guest post by Barrie Sander – University of Cambridge, Law, Class of 2007; University of Leiden, Public International Law LLM, Class of 2008; public international lawyer; founding member of ARC (Advice, Representation Cases), an organization dedicated to improving the functioning of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights.
In my inaugural blog post for LawGives, I want to explain how this fantastic start-up is not only developing a product which meets a pressing need in society, but also reflects the spirit of a generation.
Like the co-founders of LawGives, I am a member of what is commonly referred to as Generation Y (or the Millennial Generation), which may be understood to broadly encompass anyone born since the 1980s. In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, William Deresiewicz characterized this generation in the following terms:
Call it Generation Sell. Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed. When I hear from young people who want to get off the careerist treadmill and do something meaningful, they talk, most often, about opening a restaurant. Nonprofits are still hip, but students don’t dream about joining one, they dream about starting one. In any case, what’s really hip is social entrepreneurship — companies that try to make money responsibly, then give it all away.
For me, this neatly sums up the spirit of our generation. We are a generation craving to “do something meaningful”, striving to make an impact. Climbing a linear hierarchical career ladder on a safe salary, “the careerist treadmill” in the words of Deresiewicz, simply isn’t enough. We are the problem-solving generation, viewing problems not as problematic but as opportunities to create solutions. As Pieter Gunst, one of the co-founders of LawGives, explained in an earlier post, “meaning is not about money, power or prestige”, but about making the world a better place, increasing the quality of life, righting a terrible wrong, and preventing the end of something good.
A recent initiative launched by a student at Oxford University, 80,000 Hours, is exemplary of this movement. The concept of 80,000 Hours is simple. The typical working life lasts 80,000 hours. With this in mind, 80,000 Hours is a community that encourages people to make the most of their 80,000 hours by becoming “effective altruists”. This concept is summarized on the initiative’s website in the following terms:
An effective altruist is someone who makes helping others a significant part of their lives and tries to make their help as effective as possible.
Effective altruists believe that helping people is a good thing. They believe that it matters a lot to make people’s lives better. It matters even when those people are far away and are people you’ve never met.
The other thing that unites effective altruists is that they want to make as much of a difference as they can. They think it’s worth thinking your options through carefully, to make an estimate about which actions will make the world the best place. So when they choose between two jobs, they think about the difference each job would make compared with what would happen if they didn’t take it. When they give to a charity, they take estimates of how much good the charity will do with that money very seriously.
80,000 Hours helps people determine the “high impact career” best suited to their skills and interests. One such career is “innovating” or social entrepreneurship, with its potential to make transformative changes in society.
Having had the pleasure of spending a week recently getting to know the LawGives team, as well as students and professors at Stanford Law School, I am convinced that I will struggle to find a community where this social entrepreneurial spirit is more prevalent. The “giving back” culture is everywhere. For example, take StartX, the Stanford student startup accelerator, unique for its focus on education rather than profit. The program takes no equity (it is a nonprofit) and provides participants with a community of talented, successful entrepreneurs who themselves are more than eager to act as mentors and “give back” to the new generation of young entrepreneurs rising through the ranks.
Which brings me to LawGives itself. The concept behind LawGives is simple. The law at present is generally inaccessible, confusing and costly. Yet, as noted above, with every problem comes an opportunity to create a solution. With this in mind, LawGives is developing a platform to help different communities connect with relevant lawyers for the provision of free and low-cost legal advice, to communicate between themselves and with other communities and stakeholders so that common legal rights and interests are aligned and taken into account, and to help lawyers and law students participate in these communities to make a difference where their rights are at stake.
The initial focus of LawGives is on the start-up community in California, a natural fit for the initiative given its home in the heart of Silicon Valley and Stanford University. But the potential scope of LawGives is far wider than this community. There are a wide range of different communities and individuals who could benefit from the technology being developed by the LawGives team. I intend to explore at least one of these communities in a future blog post for this site.
The journey for LawGives is just beginning. Yet, what is clear even at this early stage is that LawGives reflects the spirit of a generation, encompassing a team dedicated to developing an innovative solution to one of the world’s most pressing needs: access to justice.
LawGives, along with our advisor, Roland Vogl and other leading lights from the CodeX community are highlighted in an article today in VentureBeat, “a media company obsessed with covering amazing technology and why it matters in our lives. From the most innovative companies and the incredible people behind them to the money fueling it all, we’re devoted to exhaustive coverage of the technology revolution.” We’re all about innovation, we’ve certainly got some incredible people supporting us, and together we can support a new generation of “transformational lawyers” motivated to use the law for good, who see law and technology as catalysts for positive change, comfortable using both to address the access to justice gap. Here’s some choice quotes from the article:
At Stanford’s Center for Legal Informatics (CodeX), some of the brightest legal and technical minds are taking on the most complex aspects of the justice system. Roland Vogl, executive director and lecturer in law at Stanford University, said he intends to bring the law into the millennial age.
The mission? “Creating legal technology that empowers all parties in the legal system,” he said.
Vogl said he has witnessed a slow growth in startup activity. Code Is Law, run by LawGives co-founder Pieter Gunst, is a CodeX-sponsored meetup of law students and coders who meet every week in the basement of the Stanford Law School to hack legal technology projects.
“Beautiful code is like beautiful law: the simpler the better. Human-computer collaboration is the future, and it will make things better,” said Gunst.
…
In 2009, the Legal Services Corporation reported that one in five of the legal issues experienced by low-income people are not addressed by a private or legal-aid lawyer.
LawGives, a startup founded by three international lawyers, is developing an online platform to improve legal access for people in need. Co-founder Tony Lai said a new generation of “transformation lawyers” is willing to provide cheap or free services in order to gain experience.
“There is so much need and just so much to gain by working together,” he said.
Lai points to some harrowing statistics released by the Center for American Progress: The average hourly billing rate for attorneys in the U.S. is $284; meanwhile, for every one attorney willing to provide pro-bono legal services, there are 6,415 unopened cases.
…
Read the full article here!
We were first introduced to Colin Rule when he gave a guest lecture at Stanford Law School for our Law, Science & Technology colloquium. Colin currently is CEO of Modria, an awesome (and in our opinion game changing)
platform that offers online dispute resolution implementation assistance. From 2003 to 2011 Colin was Director of Online Dispute Resolution for eBay and PayPal. He has worked in the dispute resolution field for two decades as a mediator, trainer, and consultant. He is currently Co-Chair of the Advisory Board at the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution at UMass-Amherst, and he is a Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. We are privileged to (officially) welcome Colin to the LawGives family — his advice is thoughtful, critical, and enlightening.
Ryan Osten, 28, is a rising star in Toronto. He obtained his law degree and worked at top-tier IP litigation
boutique Bereskin & Parr. Owing to his strong interest in technology and venture finance, Ryan joined Kensington Capital Partners and wrote Levels I and II of the CFA examinations (passing on his first attempts, though he didn’t want us to advertise that). While preparing for the Level III exam, Ryan accepted the position of General Counsel at Artemis Investment Management. Ryan’s enthusiasm for LawGives and unquenchable thirst for learning makes him an exceptional advisor and teammate.
The LawGives team is proud to announce that Ron A. Dolin has joined our Advisory Board. Ron is an entrepreneur and engineer with 
expertise in search and related Information Retrieval technology. He was an Engineering Program Manager for Google, where he worked from 2000 to 2006. His work there included analyzing the search algorithm, as well as starting the search evaluation team. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a J.D. from the University of California, Hastings. His dissertation focused on “scalable distributed architectures for locating heterogeneous information sources” and his knowledge in this area will be invaluable in guiding the development of the LawGives knowledge base and matching system.
Ron has already been a great source of feedback and guidance to us and we’re thrilled to have him officially on board.
We’ve just come out of an amazing morning’s design hackathon with a group of incredibly inspiring designers and causes.
desgn.it, a new tribe and movement brought to us by Matthew Scharpnick and Gopika Prabhu at elefint designs accepted us to be matched up with top designers Reggie Wirjadi and Konina Biswas who donated a few hours this morning to hack with us. They understood what we were trying to achieve, they listened to our story and were able to visualize, beautifully, the many complexities of our product and mission, into a simple, coherent vision for a front page. We have the start of something that we believe will not only look amazing, but will inspire trust in our mission and the work of our community. On top of that, we heard presentations from Robert Brunner of Ammunition, and Kyle Smitley of barley & birch, who brought us their stories, the why, the what and the how of design, the importance of brand, meaning the experience and authenticity. Our thanks to this brilliant community for arranging this. We salute and embrace everything about the desgn.it philosophy!
Starting a project like LawGives is a learning process. Designing a product, thinking about marketing, building a company structure that reflects our social goals and ambitions, forging partnerships and relations, managing a team as well as ourselves. All those things have become part of daily practice, and indeed, sometimes – just sometimes – we have to make up solutions to problems on the fly.
Luckily, there are some great resources available. Take “The Art of the Start” (“The time-tested, battle-hardened guide for anyone starting anything”), written by Guy Kawasaki, for example. Kawasaki has a talent for simplifying things. He says:
There really is only one question we should ask ourselves before starting a new venture: Do I make meaning?
Meaning is not about money, power or prestige. Kawasaki gives a number of examples. Meaning can be:
Thinking about this, I feel that our motivations are driven by not one, but all of these reasons. Let’s have a brief look at all of them.
Make the world a better place (and some history). Ever since I met Tony and Bradley, we’ve been thinking about problems and solutions. The law provides a particularly interesting breeding ground for such discussions because of our (relative) expertise in the field, it’s deep ties with our social environment, and the many challenges that accessing the law presents. When we first met we started working on a project related to privacy. Particularly relevant today, when we are leading increasingly public lives online. We discontinued the project because we gained insight in the difficulties and realized that others were better placed to solve this problem. But it was at that time that we established that we shared a common motivation to change our world for the better and use our skills and knowledge to make meaning.
Increase the quality of life (or die trying). Each of us had been practicing law, and had thus gained some insight in how legal services and legal information are delivered nowadays. We know that almost all of us – whether wealthy or poor – experience legal issues at some point. We also know that searching for the right legal help is often confusing, time-consuming and uncertain as to cost. Being the bunch of nerds that we are, we started thinking about how such problems are being tackled in other fields today. Based on that work, we have come to believe that we can come up with a solution that makes things a bit more efficient. And increases the quality of life of many.
Right a terrible wrong (hopefully with the help of some friends). Interestingly, it doesn’t stop there. We’re actually on a mission to right several terrible wrongs. I’ll mention two of the most pertinent here.
Prevent the end of something good (make some noise). On some fronts, we are fighting an uphill battle. This is particularly the case – no surprises there – with regard to pro bono. One particular issue that we have been worrying about is the push by the House Appropriations Committee for a 26 percent cut in funding to Legal Services Corporation, the largest provider of funding for civil legal services for low-income people. The LSC is a bright spot in an otherwise not-so-pleasant corner of society. As we go, we’ll try to make some noise to give these issues the attention they deserve.
Writing it all down, I believe that these are the things that have been keeping us motivated for the past months. Kawasaki claims that it took him 20 years to come to this understanding. We were happy to learn his distilled wisdom and hope you can learn something too.
As always, feel free to contact us.
We couldn’t help but point out this interesting New York Times article reflecting on proposals to reduce the length of the standard three-year law school model. This part resonated particularly well with us:
Ultimately, the question about reducing the cost of legal education should be less about its length but rather its quality. Law schools must put greater emphasis in developing and strengthening programs that would help law students become engaged and ethical lawyers. These include increasing the availability of skills-based courses, clinical and internship programs, enhanced academic support and mentoring services, providing more mentoring and offering more interdisciplinary courses. By enhancing the traditional model instead of radically changing it, many law students might just view their legal education as an important investment in time and money.
As a law student, I could not be more excited about LawGives. This young startup has the potential to positively impact several areas of the legal profession, including the education of its student members. My own experience as a student at Stanford Law School (SLS) may be informative.
My initial introduction to LawGives came from a student survey organized by co-founder Tony Lai. Thereafter, in an effort to gain a better understanding of the organization’s mission, I explored their website and reached out to the founders, with questions in hand. From this inquiry, I discovered the many opportunities LawGives can provide law students, from direct mentorship by legal professionals to hands-on legal work.
Of course, existing areas of legal education, most notably law school clinics, offer supervised, real world work. For example, my law school hosts one of the most highly regarded clinical programs in the country. Even still, and like all law schools, its offerings are constrained by the typical concerns of university programming (i.e. costs, personnel, space). These constraints result in SLS offering only a small collection of litigation clinics and a single transactional clinic. What is more, most clinics deal with a narrow area of law, have limited enrollment, and are highly competitive. Consequently, not all law students have the opportunity to explore and develop their particular legal interests in an experiential manner.
I am one of those law students. My legal interests involve transactional and corporate governance concerns affecting nascent companies in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, even Stanford Law doesn’t host a clinic in this area. This is precisely why I am excited about LawGives; it can help address a large void in my, and many of my peers’, legal education. Their services create networks between legal professionals, law students, and underrepresented clients to address a wide-range of legal issues. Such a network has the potential to allow any law student (myself included) to engage in experiential learning, no matter their area of interest.
A meaningful mentorship and hands-on experience are both essential components of a complete, legal education. Unfortunately, too many students graduate without them. Thankfully LawGives is taking meaningful steps to reverse this fact.
By Brian Hoffman – Stanford J.D., Class of 2013
