The other issue is the absolutely bonkers number of attorney-hours racked up in reading all of those documents once they've been systematized.
That's where I see potential in this market. Ediscovery is a pain-point for law firm clients - especially large corporate clients who are constantly involved in complex litigation.
Document review has to happen in order to effectively litigate (gotta find the smoking gun!) but when a bill comes through with hundreds or thousands of attorney-hours devoted to reading your opponent's old emails, ouch. The client hasn't even seen a work product yet.
They've been virtually entirely replaced by digital systems. I graduated from law school a few years ago and we were not taught to use a book-based system to do research.
Some much older attorneys use books, but they hardly ever do research anyway, since they have young guns to do it.
Please, oh please, make this a reality: "By classifying regulations using the same system that science librarians use to organize papers in agriculture, we can determine which scientific papers may form the rationale for particular regulations, and link the regulations to the papers that explain the underlying science."
I cannot begin to describe how incredibly useful this would be. Regulators rely on the information provided by regulatory attorneys to craft their policies, so it's critical that the attorneys have a deep understanding of the issues. And paid legal research tools just don't/can't/wont provide that sort of information.
In this vein, it would be wonderful to include social sciences - topics like economics and finance. Perhaps SSRN is a good option.
The role of a regulatory attorney is to explain to the regulatory agency why they should do something (think: PPM in power plant emissions, high-frequency trading controls, restrictions on flight paths and requirements for airport construction, you name it, it's regulated).
But the attorney doing the explaining is trained in law, not in whatever the technical subject matter is. So the attorney relies on his client's experts in the field for information. But if an attorney doesn't have a basic understanding of the technical aspects, he won't know what questions to ask to get the right details, and he won't be able to make meaningful strategy decisions.
In turn, most regulatory agencies are required by law to make decisions based only on the documents and information provided to them in the hearing/filing process. And all those documents are prepared by attorneys. If the attorneys miss a detail, the regulatory agency misses it too.
I would envision this sort of tool as providing background that will allow the attorney to ask the right questions, rather than a complete education on the technical subject matter.
Lawyers don't necessarily need to code to improve their own lives - but they MUST learn to code to improve their relationships with their clients.
If there is any aspect of programming involved in any contract or lawsuit (which is becoming the norm), the lawyer absolutely must have at least a vague grasp of the tech to be effective.
Too many lawyers and judges are just utterly perplexed, and it leads to bad law that makes things more difficult for everyone down the road.
Even the most basic understanding of programming would be so so helpful, if only because it makes the world of computers slightly less alien to your average legal practitioner.
I'm negotiating a contract with a software subcontractor and I had to involve our legal department. The lawyer I'm dealing with quite clearly understands software (speaks knowledgeably about OSS, although I don't remember if he's actually a programmer), but I can't think of a single case where programming knowledge would have been useful. Instead, I'm the outsider, because everything that comes up for discussion is an issue of Contract Law and nothing specific to Software.
The perfect use failure rate for symptoms-based fertility awareness is (according to Wikipedia anyway) 0.6% per woman per year. (So, 1 woman in 167 per year.) The typical use failure rate is 1.8%, or 1 woman in 56.
Sorry, my question is: How does one use symptoms-based perfectly?
My understanding is that a perfect use case happens only a few days each month. So on those few days, you might have very low "failure" rates, but on the other 25 days per month, is a "perfect use" possible?
Sorry I misinterpreted your question! Just a little background -- the reason symptoms-based works is because it's only possible to conceive for ~12-24 hours per cycle. The uterus can sustain sperm for a period of ~2-5 days, so if there's no sperm in the uterus for this ~6 day period, pregnancy is not possible. There are several indicators that signal the beginning of this period: basal body temperature, cervical mucus consistency, and cervical position. To get the best readings, however, these measurements need to be taken immediately after waking up. Moreover, you need a long period of readings (> 6 months) in order to be able to correctly interpret the measurements. I'm assuming that perfect use in this context consists of taking these measurements consistently over a period of at least six months.
In other words, "natural family planning" achieves its very low "perfect use" failure rate by solving a different (and easier) problem from the ones addressed by other methods.
It's easy (in principle) to solve the problem of avoiding pregnancy: "just" avoid all sexual activity. The problem contraceptives were invented to address wasn't the problem of avoiding pregnancy but the problem of having sex without getting pregnant.
"Natural family planning" is -- when done optimally -- very effective at the "without getting pregnant" part of that, but not so good on the "having sex" part, since somewhere around half the time it's equivalent to abstinence.
Redefining the problem isn't always a bad thing, but it's as well to be aware of when it's being done.
That's fair as far as it goes. But you can mix NFP with other birth control methods to combine the advantages. Sex without condoms is valued by lots of people, so it's useful to know that even if you use condoms the rest of the time. On top of that, NFP can also help if you are trying to get pregnant.
As others have said, it would be a good idea to speak to a lawyer.
I know that the taxes and fees associated with becoming an LLC or corporation can seem steep, but if you plan to hire employees, it is an absolutely vital step. You said your business is a sole proprietorship, and that opens you, personally, up to all of the liability that your business incurs. In other words, if something goes awry and your business is sued, your home is on the line. And your risk for being sued increases as you take on employees/volunteers/interns/etc.
Look for a business law clinic at a local law school - they might charge a small fee but there's a good chance they will work for free. Your issues likely have a simple solution, and there's no reason to pay a lot in legal fees for that.
The LLC step (when I had done it before) was pretty straightforward over at http://www.legalzoom.com/ but it was a few hundred bucks and I did it for exactly the reasons you described...to get out of that open liability that the business could incur (I was younger, and thinking bigger about the growth my little company would have so I did a whole bunch of research to try and do the best thing I could do at the start). But I ended up shutting down the LLC because of the expense/benefit ratio wasn't working for me at the time and then stopped doing business really until I started up again in 2010 with the software business on a tiny scale.
If I did decide to take on a more employees/volunteers it would definitely be a route I'd want to take again.
We don't have any local law schools within a few hundred miles, but I think we do have one business law instructor here at the college who might allow me to pick his brain if I asked.
Thanks again for the feedback!
(Sorry for the delay in my reply...HN started giving me the "You're submitting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks" error when I tried to submit this reply and another one).
I work in an industry in which it's extremely important to justify business expenses to regulators months or years after the transaction takes place. The ability to build a complete, real-time narrative around expenses, instead of jotting a few notes about a receipt two weeks later would be so helpful.
It seems that your focus is exclusively on small businesses. Is that the case?
That sounds like a great use case for Abacus. We do target small businesses for the most part, but the only thing holding back a company from signing up with Abacus is if they want a whole bunch of custom accounting work done, which we won't do.
You're right. Klout as a standalone service was unviable from the beginning.
Especially in light of the up-and-coming services like Quora, Thoughtly, Medium, etc., that actually attempt to measure and curate according to the quality of the person talking, Klout is extremely lucky to be making their exit now.
There are two obvious uses, but many we have yet to consider.
The first is on resumes, where context for life experience and outside interests is missing. As we move away from degrees to skills, the importance of quantifiable involvement in an area is increasingly valued! Secondly in comment sections and social media. It's easy to throw around statements online, but I think it would be great to be able to demonstrate both conventional (scholarship) and unconventional (Blogs, Q&A, Reddit, etc.) experience to speak with authority everywhere...
That's where I see potential in this market. Ediscovery is a pain-point for law firm clients - especially large corporate clients who are constantly involved in complex litigation. Document review has to happen in order to effectively litigate (gotta find the smoking gun!) but when a bill comes through with hundreds or thousands of attorney-hours devoted to reading your opponent's old emails, ouch. The client hasn't even seen a work product yet.