A perspective on why it might be a bad idea to have outside investment in law-ish firms and why legal has long been disfavored as a startup investment (now changing a bit). 

Two thoughts:

1. In a professional relationship, the best solution returns all the value to the client.  Like good teaching.  When done perfectly, the professional retains none of the value, other than reputation and acknowledgement for their effort (which may be financial).
2. Law is public.  I’ve expressed this a number of times.  In short, there is really no solution to “law” or “the law of the parties” that does not put the parties in control and the text in the public.  The network benefits of law, and the flatness of text, mean that there just isn’t anything that the supplier can hold back, except how parts go together.  If the fit of the parts is easy to see, then all that is left to sell is lawyering in the traditional sense.

“Public” law –

We are used to thinking of law as public in the sense of governmental.  “Public” can, of course, mean the opposite as when we refer to “public comment” on a proposed administrative decision, or public service.

This surfaces with confounding effect (to American ears) in the British vs American meanings of “public” schools.  In the US, they are run by governments, in the UK they are part of civil society.

Back to “public law.”  Shared texts provide a basis for collective decision-making that does not depend on governmental institutions.  The rules of marketplaces, trade associations and the like are examples.  The prior post to Eben Moglen’s discussion at the EU parliament of the revisions to the GNU public license is another.  The Cmacc data model extends those possibilities. 

Eben Moglen on the GPL revision process as public legislation.

A couple of well-wishers have suggested that the CommonAccord initiative (I meant the fate of the idea rather than the fate of any particular website or promoter) will depend on the details of implementation.  With full acknowledgement of their good intentions, I disagree.

Some kinds of things depend on principles.  The details work themselves out.  This is the correct structure of a lot of legal ideas.  One might say that it is the structure of any legal idea that really works.

From the tablets (e.g., @arihersh) to the Napoleonic Code and the UCC, stuff that works in law has a layered structure of principle, elaboration, commentary and uses.  This idea is not totally dissimilar to @zittrain’s hourglass.  An hourglass is two triangles that meet.

CommonAccord is an attempt to boil “legal IT” down to a few principles of regular IT.

As always, thanks to @marclauritsen.

There is no reason that contracts can’t have harmonized taxonomies.  Note the plurals.  There are:  an external taxonomy –  of the kinds of contracts; and an internal taxonomy – of the provisions of the contract.  And different groups will at least start with different taxonomies (both external and internal).   Even if network benefits (Klausen et al, Triantis), history, and common sense demonstrate that in the field of law it will all converge.

But as a matter of process, it is important that there be room for various solutions at all levels of the stack.  No exclusivity.  Exclusivity is procrustean and requires meetings.  In FOSS, they speak of the cathedral and the bazaar. Bazaars are fast and broad.

I’ll focus on internal taxonomies for the moment because order comes best from the inside out and the internals will affect how we view externals.

The deepest commonality among agreements is the frame.  I invite you to look at Model_Agt_Frame.  (If you don’t have a password, use Temporary as your log in and Today as your password.)  From that you will see some other ideas about taxonomies.  Note even that within the system taxonomies are not exclusive.  From the home page, go to the Model Stock Purchase Agreement and note the simplicity of on-boarding using section numbers.  Names can be mapped to the numbers.  And Kingsley has very developed ideas about taxonomies. KMStandards.com

If you have a sustained thought about a different way (one you think, at least provisionally, might be better) please feel free to fork Model_Agt_Frame by creating a new page (named perhaps with your Twitter handle in the URL?) and letting us know. You or I can cross-reference it on the site and maybe here.

I’m suggesting we use the Mediawiki platform at beta.commonaccord.org/wiki because it is really simple and familiar to Wikipedia users.   It has an extremely limited version of the data model, but is sweet-natured.