MediaTech Law

Why would lawyers give away legal documents for free? Or better yet, why wouldn’t they do it? Daniel Doktori offered some good answers to these questions when he wrote recently in TechCrunch about Big Law’s answer to the Open Data movement.

But what’s most remarkable about the big lawyer giveaway – get there early, get your legal docs, we’re opening this year at 6pm on Thanksgiving Night! – may be how unremarkable it really is.

Doktori writes of law firms’ “mimic[ing] their small clients’ ‘freemium’ business development model”, suggesting that giving away free stuff is simply a way to get clients in the door where they (hopefully) will become paying clients. Perhaps. But it seems unlikely that a cash-strapped startup will hire a $700 per hour firm of attorneys simply because that firm gave away a generic founders’ subscription agreement. And with so many law firms offering the exact same documents – Doktori cites his own firm’s service as well and those of Cooley LLP and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP – there’s not much here to really differentiate the value of these documents in the first place. Not to mention the various non-law firm startups getting into the same game, including Founders’ Workbench (mentioned by Doktori) and low-cost services from Rocket Lawyer and others.