Last week, Ben Hatten of Legal River e-mailed to let me know his company had just released a "terms of service generator" and a "privacy policy generator." Having seen my earlier review of the Wilson Sonsini and Orrick term sheet generators, he knew I'd be interested.

As I am. I’m hopeful that, over the next 2 to 3 years, we’ll accelerate the speed at which we put distance between our era and the 19th Century inefficiencies around access to legal learning. This cause has many fronts.

The front being addressed by the online "generators" of legal documents, such as the Wilson and Orrick applications, as well as forms now being supplied by Legal River and others, is the most important. It has to do with breaking down the wall of secrecy between what legal practitioners learn, iterate, improve and update over years of investment in their trade, on the one hand, and the need of entrepreneurs to access, understand, utilize and question that living knowledge, on the other hand.

The form terms of service (“TOS”) and the form privacy policy now available at the Legal River site are worthwhile, and startuppers (from bootstrappers to the funded), emerging company employees, and lawyers, alike, will find them useful. It would be too generous, however, to call the Legal River documents "generators" or applications. Your online engagement with these forms is limited to your supplying them with your company's name and some contact information. Though that's alright. Getting a template with your name in it is worth the minute of effort, as it may have the useful psychological effect of making you read all the boilerplate T’s and C’s from a fresh (first-person) point of view.

In the process of constructing TOS that you can use for your own business, you’ll still need to noodle a list of comparable companies and sites, check out their TOS, ask questions of and compare notes with fellow travelers (including lawyers), and make your own calls where your business model and your values suggest you ought to build select TOS rules from scratch.

Here's an example: in the TOS supplied by Legal River, on the subject of user generated content, it says: 

"By posting your Content using the Services, you are granting an unrestricted, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, perpetual, worldwide, and fully transferable, assignable, and sublicensable right and license to use, copy, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create collective or derivative works from, distribute, perform and display your Content in whole or in part and to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed. You further warrant that all so-called moral rights in the content have been waived."

Let's suppose your site is all about user generated content. In this simple hypothetical, it is easy to imagine that you and members of your community might actually want to embrace moral rights of attribution, and that, however user content might be re-syndicated or re-purposed (and the license language in the Legal River form is pretty good for such broad purposes), you might want to promise to always keep the author’s name, and maybe even a web link designated by the author, associated with that author's content. If that's the case, you don't want your TOS to have a blanket waiver of any and all moral rights.

But kudos to Legal River for making a start by supplying thoughtful, comprehensive forms that represent a significant investment. It is certainly conceivable that, over time, a robust set of alternative provisions could be threaded into the drafts, and a wizard created to lead one through the (appropriately complex) maze to the appropriate choices. (Such nuance and sophistication are provided by the Wilson and Orrick term sheet generators.)

Other fronts in the cause include those internal to the legal trade. At his talk in Bellevue a week or two ago, Dean Huttenlocher of Cornell decried what he called the “20th Century search tools” used to manage the conduct of litigation (and I think for the Dean, calling something “20th Century” may be more pejorative than how I use “19th Century” as an adjective!). What Google Scholar does now for certain case law shows us a better way. What a boon it will be to someday have all contracts, that I or anyone else has ever written, accessible and available for reference, reflection or reworking!