I received a call on Thursday from the marketing director of a prestigious law firm about a new feature that was just released on RealDealDocs.com. I wrote about it last week, but basically it makes it very easy to find legal agreements and contracts from top law firms, including, for example, agreements involving Latham Watkins, Wachtell Litpon agreements, Baker McKenzie contracts, etc.
It seems that an attorney at this marketing director’s firm mentioned that he had seen one of his agreements on a page on our site that highlighted agreements involving his firm, and he was wondering where the contracts came from.
We explained that these were publicly available documents, and that everyone is comfortable with both the legality and the ethics of posting these legal documents. What makes it interesting is that, for the first time, there are millions of legal documents, including agreements and contracts, located in one place that are so easily searchable across lots of different criteria, including types of agreements, document titles, governing law, law firm, industry, etc., all the way down to the clause search level.
We started talking about the implications on larger law firms’ practices. Our view is that this is another opportunity to get a firm’s name out in front of an audience of people working on the very deals that these firms specialize in, and it will help those who work to take advantage of this. In fact, later this summer we plan on doing just that - providing law firms with an opportunity to get involved in contributing additional content, such as firm or practice area profiles, uploading additional documents or templates, etc. to get in front of this audience.
What do you think?
Actually, if you don’t have permission to publish someone’s work then you are unethically distributing someone else’s work as your own. Basically, who pays for the document creation, gets to decode how the document is used, unless the contract states otherwise. This is further complicated by the fact that not all document are created for a corporation are by it’s own employee’s, but often contracted out, with it’s own set of contractual restrictions.
Ethically, you should alway have a “permission to use” contract in place for each document on your site that you did not create yourself. This “permission to use” will also state explicitly how the material may be used, without further permission.
Thanks Tim. Those are excellent points based on longstanding intellectual property doctrine. The difference here is that the documents in question have all been filed with the SEC and are already available online there and with any number of online publishers (just not easily searchable).
We certainly use IP assignment language to avoid these types of IP ownership issues for our own content authors, but in this case it’s fair use and permitted under the SEC/EDGAR filing requirements.
The broader question to me is whether and how lawyers can take use this to their advantage, and what impact, if any, it will have on billing rates or on potentially leveling the playing field for independent practitioners. Thoughts?