Could attorney 2.0 be a new way to get legal representation? I'm thinking about getting a patent and was wondering about an alternative to spending $400 per hour on one attorney. What if someone spent $200 and got 2 attorneys/law firms that work together remotely with secure collaborative office software similar to Google Docs? That way an average person like me would have a team of lawyers each with a different point of view. Maybe even a paralegal or someone with less experience would be willing to be a part of the team for free for experience. Would something like this ever be possible, or is it unnecessary for an average person to have a team of lawyers? I have no desire to patent a possible invention from this idea... Maybe if someone got a patent, they could make a donation to charity with royalties.
I think this idea has prior art. It is called &quot;a law firm&quot;. There are many ways in which such organizations can be structured, but what you end up with is a team of people with different levels of experience, and different specialities, who are able to take on a variety of legal work. Some of that will be routine, and some of it will explode into years of complex litigation. Internal collaboration is normal, including with the aid of technology. Larger firms will have many locations and lots of people. As a client, the fees you pay are a reflection of the market. If you would like to pay $200/hour for two people rather than $400/hour for one, then a prerequisite is that those people are willing to do it. Maybe they are and maybe they aren't. It's just like paying for any other kind of service. In some practice areas, it's possible to offer low fees for &quot;bulk&quot; or &quot;routine&quot; work - sometimes because that's amenable to automation, such as with air passenger delay claims. Patent law may not fall into this category because it is genuinely very difficult to write a patent well. You have to know the law and the technology, and the starting point presented by the client may be far from expressing the actual patentable ideas, if any. That means we have a more high-touch process with specialized expertise. The long durations involved also make it unsuitable for a &quot;no win, no fee&quot; structure (that is essentially a business risk management issue, where some cases pay for the rest). As a business idea, you would have to think about how to manage all that. Maybe you can make it work.
It would probably be very easy for a third-year associate to find someone willing to pay him $250 to spend an hour fighting a traffic ticket. But if you're talking about a full-time job practicing law with a base salary equal to $250/hour, I'll go out on a limb and say the chances are literally zero. That rate works out to about $520,000 annually, and there is probably not a firm in the world paying that much to third-year associates. Even among the highest-paying firms, the average is closer to $200K, which puts you at $96/hour. The highest associate pay I've hard of is about $330K, and that's for associates at the top of an eight-year pay schedule. And of course, if you're at a top-paying law firm, you're working closer to 60 hours a week than 40. And if you're at the top of their payscale, you're probably closer to 80 hours than 60. So even at $330K, you're still only at about $105/hour. Luckily, these firms often offer very handsome bonuses, but even if you were somehow pulling down $330K for only 40 hours a week, you'd need a $190,000 bonus to get yourself to $250/hour. For lawyers, at least, this does not happen. Anywhere. If it did, it would not happen to a third-year associate. If it did, it would not happen to a third-year associate from a second-tier law school. (It is not at all uncommon for a third-year associate to charge $250/hour, but that associate is not getting paid all or even most of that money.)
You &quot;can&quot; do it any way you want, it's just that there are certain risks associated with option 1 vs 2 vs 3 or 4. Generally speaking, the lowest risk is associated with hiring a lawyer to discuss your requirements and write the necessary documents. It's possible that the most risky approach is writing your own documents, depending on how much legal knowledge you have and also what laws you are concerned with. You might try saying &quot;I'm not liable for anything&quot;, but that doesn't make you not liable. Not all liability is waivable and there can be special requirements for waiving liability (&quot;prominent notice&quot;, which means what? in this jurisdiction). You can write rules, but they aren't necessarily enforceable. A type of situation that you don't want to get yourself into is where you boot a user for what you consider to be an offense, but in booting the user it turns out that you have breached your contract with him (you figure this out when he successfully sues you). A lawyer will (or should) know that a certain kind of clause is illegal, and a legal-language generating program may simply have systematized the legal knowledge of actual lawyers, so the program won't offer you an illegal clause (if it's a good program). So anything short of hiring a lawyer who is competent in the relevant areas increases your risk, and the conclusion that &quot;I can't afford a lawyer&quot; has to be weighed against &quot;I can't afford a $10,000 judgment against me&quot;.
This answer to a related question sums up the relevant concepts regarding work for hire. Since, according to your description of your relationship to A, you are not an employee (Commun. for Non-Violence (CCNV) v. Reid 490 U.S. 730), and you do not a written agreement, under US law, this would not be a work for hire: thus you hold copyright to something. I presume Company A gave you the source code and you are rewriting it to fit some technical requirement, so you have been given permission by the copyright holder to create a derivative work. You do not gain copyright to the original code: you only hold copyright to what you wrote. You would therefore need the permission of the copyright holder (of the original program) to sell copies of the modified program (currently A, company B in the future once the transfer is complete). There isn't a special "signing-over" ceremony for permission to copy, but the situation you describe is very messy. Even without a written agreement, you do understand that they intend to make multiple copies of the resulting program which includes your contribution, and you have received something of value in exchange for your contribution. So, one would argue, you have at least given permission to copy your stuff, even without a piece of signed paper -- in hiring you, you have given them an implied license to use what they paid you to create. The unclarity would be in whether you transferred your property rights, or simply licensed them to use it. Hence the recommendation to get an IP attorney.
The issues you describe have existed with signatures from the beginning of their use. There exists a tradeoff between ease of use and reliability, both of forgery and of people falsely claiming forgery. Originally, the closest thing to a signature was the use of seals and signet rings. While relatively hard to forge, it only showed that the possessor of the object agreed. Signatures, especially in cursive font, were developed later. They were in some ways easier to forge(you didn't need to get access to a physical device), but more difficult in others(the seal symbols tended to be used on everything and various improvements in technology had been made), and harder to falsely claim forgery(because most people can't alter their handwriting well). You were affixing your name to the document, indicating that you agreed. Often, the signatures were required to backed up with the signatures of other people as witnesses. They didn't have to agree to the document, they just had to agree to testify that you signed of your own free will. Because witnesses, especially trustworthy and independent witnesses, are hard to come by, some places have dropped that requirement, such as checks and signing a aper receipt when using a credit card. But for some important documents, certain jurisdictions still require witnesses, including large transactions (a document relating to a car insurance payout I recently had required a witness to confirm my signature) and marriages. However, with electronic media, the point of a signature is more to indicate deliberate acceptance of terms, with verification of an individual being left to other processes (e.g. IP address, MAC address, linkage to a specific email account, etc.), so forgery is less of an issue. I have also seen "signatures" amount to checkboxes and "I agree" buttons. Generally, the higher the stakes and "more legal" the agreement, the more likely to these have been the "typed signatures" that you describe, but this seems to be decreasing in frequency, suggesting that its purpose was to stop gap a hole in legal acceptance by judges/courts/laws with regards to electronic communications. Addendum: It should also note that the replacement of seals by signatures is not universal; for instance in Japan, seals are still used over signatures in the majority of cases.
The official judgements do not reveal the funding for these lawyers; so where can I find this information? Nowhere. The commercial arrangements between lawyers and their clients are private and confidential like any other business transactions. You have no more right to know this then you do to know how your neighbour pays their mortgage. how could she have funded litigation in the EWHC and then EWCA before the UKSC? She may have rich parents or another benefactor who has in interest in her or the outcome of the case. She may have won the lottery. She may be the heiress of a dead rich uncle. By the way, "having" student loans does not mean you "need" student loans. Interest rates on student loans are cheap - if I need to pay $10,000 for a course and have $10,000 earning 5%, I would be nuts to use that if I could take out a loan at 3%.
You can jointly hire a lawyer Yes, they can jointly hire a lawyer, coming at the lawyer essentially as one single entity: a partnership. The lawyer will research both sides of the question, and give the partnership a fair report. The fee you pay may not deliver to one definitive answer, but it'll discuss all the likely angles. However, if one of them needs a lawyer in an action against the other, that jointly hired lawyer will be "conflicted out". So Bob should identify the best lawyer in town in that particular area of practice, and retain that lawyer privately without telling Rob. Then, identify the second best lawyer in town, and recommend to Rob to use that lawyer for the "joint" lawyer. Now, when we come down to Bob vs Rob, Bob has the best lawyer, and Rob's is third best. Facts and circumstances will decide the matter The biggest problem with floating a hypothetical question is that the actual facts and circumstances in your genuine flesh-and-blood case are likely to be different. Understand that litigants are especially stupid about this. There's a huge bias to believe matter X is relevant/on-point to their own case, when a neutral judge may not see it that way at all. Likewise, there's a huge bias toward presenting your hypothetical in flattering terms, on the hopes of getting a more favorable ruling. Then, when the real case comes up, the facts and circumstances differ too much, and the judge says "these facts don't fit your declaratory judgment". And now it's a new ballgame. Your best bet, in areas of doubt, is to obtain legal advice and pay heed to it.
Bulgaria is one of many countries in which intellectual property can be protected with a single international patent filing, in lieu of a Bulgarian specific filing. In generally, you should assume that any patented idea likely to have international application, such as Internet based software, which is patented in the U.S. is also the subject of international patent protection, unless you specifically know that this is not the case. Virtually all patent lawyers know how to make this filing and most would recommend doing so in this case. So, yes, it is something you should worry about, and the better practice, by far, would be to obtain permission from the patent owner if the app is likely to have any meaningful commercial value. Now, if you were sued, there is a good chance that it would be in Bulgarian courts under Bulgarian patent law, which may be somewhat less harsh in some respects like damages awards than U.S. patent law. But, the basis for patent liability for an infringement in Bulgaria would be very similar.