Web Excursions 2021-07-14
Why most legal technologies miss the point; and how to set up the Nix package manager on Mac.
Against Legal Technology
Do lawyers need legal technology? -- Apparently not.
The most important software in my line of lawyering—commercial deals, privacy compliance, and “corporate” work—is the most important software for just about anyone else writing for dollars.
All skeuomorphs of stalwart, pre-PC devices.
None of this software exists specifically for lawyers.
None of it boasts a “lawyer mode” for legal needs.
Automation proved necessary, though not sufficient, to establish an independent practice.
A number of others lawyers have been able to leverage my tools.
But for the most part, it’s all backstage.
The other side sees a Word file, a Google Doc, an e-mail, terms on a Web page.
They don’t have any idea how much easier it was for us to prepare that work than they expect.
Would lawyers benefit from law-specific technology?
Apparently they would, individually.
But collectively? So far, not much.
Law-specific software increases the productivity and competitiveness of individual lawyers and legal teams.
But so far, broadly speaking, it hasn’t done so by challenging the standard way of getting things done across parties and organizations.
In other words, legal technology hasn’t changed the game; it has merely enhanced the performance of certain players.
The legal technology game changes as the broader, generic office game evolves.
There’s always an element of power fantasy in looking at a field top-down, envisioning a new and better way of doing business.
But saying how it ought to be instead, from a God’s-eye view looking down, is a long way from actually making the change, as if by godlike, omnipotent mandate.
To get the herd pointed to the promised land, you have to promise quite a bit.
If you can’t deliver and communicate a massive step change in value or functionality, no one is going to break from the pack.
So pending some flash of legal-tech genius, we’re stuck? It’s easy enough to turn this line of thinking around.
Set the idea of law-specific technology aside.
What could the practice of law contribute back to the general technology of reading, writing, analysis, debate, and negotiation? Is all our wisdom really law-domain specific?
Legal writers have wisdom to share with writers overall.
And if I can offer any part of that value to the main, I think it’s
by staying and working where worlds collide—law, writing, and software—
than trying to serve each, separately, on its own self-reinforcing terms.
MacOS Nix Setup (an alternative to Homebrew)
Why not Homebrew?
Unpredictable command times. It would be nice to signal to the user if compilation is about to happen
Very slow brew update times.
Homebrew’s core package database is a git repository; this design choice means that the client has to maintain its own git repo – git gc can strike at any time
Bad interactions when packages are upgraded.
ianthehenry: To others who might be interested in trying Nix instead of Homebrew:
There is a
brew install
equivalent in vanilla Nix --nix-env
provides an imperative interface pretty similiar tobrew
.nix-darwin
is a third-party thing that tries to give you a NixOS-like experience on macOS.It's not necessary if you're only interested in replacing Homebrew.
You can have
shell.nix
files and ad-hoc environments without replacing your entire system configuration.
Vanilla Nix is very well isolated, and you can try it side by side with Homebrew to see how you like it --
one of the nice side effects of Nix-installed software being independent from the rest of your system is that, well, you can install whatever you want without breaking the Homebrew equivalents.
For example instead of putting binaries in
/usr/local/bin
, Nix creates a directory of symlinks to files in/nix/store
, and you can add that directory to yourPATH
if you wish.
I switched to Nix a few months ago and have found it... fun. It's not something I would recommend if you want things to just work, but if you're curious about Nix, you can learn quite a lot about it from the comfort of your MacBook.