Story LLP helps humans cooperate to get more of what they deserve, starting with lawyers and clients. These Community Cooperation Guidelines explain more about how we pursue this mission. This includes how all members of our cooperative following these guidelines allow us to provide more affordable alternatives to clients who want them, and how to identify circumstances where we provide legal advice.
The Story Cooperative is established between and among our Story LLP Organization (including Story LLP Software Inc and the Story LLP law firm), Story LLP's Attorney Alliance of independent law firms, and the Story LLP Organization's users and clients.
We've come together to get more of what we deserve. We are all tired of paying bias taxes. Story endeavors to end them. One way we do this is by designing options for those who can't afford lawyers (yet). The Story Cooperative is designed to eliminate bias taxes from our community over time.
When we work for you, we price services to consider your degree of commitment to our Cooperative. One of the ways we unlock more affordable, but high quality, options for our clients with less means is this cooperation. This page explains how you participate in our Cooperative as well as how participation works.
By working with us, you commit to treat all members of our community, including staff, attorneys, and yourself, with the basic human respect we all deserve - regardless of demographics or birth circumstances. You also acknowledge that we use a system of radical transparency, radical consent, and cooperation to help our entire community get what we deserve in accordance with these Guidelines.
Story provides two options for clients:
Aegis: Our automated legal advice that tells you the standard we think is best given only what we know about your company so far.
Story Custom legal services: Provided by AI-assisted human lawyers in the Story Attorney Alliance.
Many clients use both Aegis and Alliance options for different needs. You can always ask us at help@storyllp.com if you have any questions or confusion about which service you're using - information about what each service will offer is always free. Depending on whether you use Aegis or the Alliance, you make different commitments to the Story Cooperative.
If your budget permits, you can engage Story LLP's law firm and our Attorney Alliance for custom legal services provided by a human and tailored to your unique needs. Story takes care to ensure that we connect only Attorney Allies who have the relevant type and level of expertise for your needs and budget, and that we only engage them for clients in a position to pay them what they're worth.
You'll engage Story and our Allies for Custom services by executing formal engagement paperwork to establish an attorney-client relationship.
If you have a limited budget, read on to learn about how we've created Aegis to lower costs by eliminating an attorney-client relationship with a human lawyer.
Aegis services include automated legal processes our firm considers basic best practices under current law. These processes are created, maintained, and overseen by elite human lawyers from our Alliance with the right specialty. We designed Aegis documents and services to be customized TO clients' basic dimensions and the structured data we create through your use of the Services, but NOT customized FOR particular clients. That is, Aegis services are designed for SIMILAR companies and transactions, but not YOUR circumstances except where expressly indicated.
Others assume every founder and company is the same, but as lawyers, we know you are each unique. We constantly look for what client features and legal developments warrant changes to forms and automated processes, and we make those changes so that our standards always reflect the best approach that's affordable to you.
To keep these affordable and serving clients without personal wealth, users who use Aegis services agree that:
YOU ASSUME ALL RISKS TO YOURSELF AND YOUR BUSINESS THAT MAY ARISE FROM USING STORY STANDARD SERVICES, WHICH ARE PROVIDED "AS-IS" WITH NO WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND as further explained in our Terms of Service.
The price of our service is conditioned on your acceptance of the above as well as our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
We strive to ensure that ALL of the information you share with us is confidential, and is only accessible to third parties for the exclusive purpose of providing the services you requested from us. You can read more about how we obtain, use, store and share information to serve you in our Privacy Policy.
Preserving Attorney-client Privilege is an important part of our Cooperative.
We treat information as "Attorney-client privileged" when:
Remember: while we as lawyers will do whatever we can to comply with all ethics rules and treat your information as privileged, this does not guarantee a court will agree that it is privielged. This is an important distinction. For privileged information, we may use software and services operated by third parties to deliver our services to you - in accordance with our Privacy Policy - under the condition that any third party:
While we strive to protect privilege on appropriate elements of Aegis Services, we cannot guarantee a court will ultimately enforce it. Judges and jurors are humans, and their behavior is impossible to predict with perfect accuracy.
Our Privacy Policy explains what data we collect and how we maintain its confidentiality. Based on such submissions from you, we design, update, and use technology to serve you. Part of that technology is generating aggregate, anonymized data about legal services to empower our Cooperative and identify best practices we can offer affordable through Aegis.
Regardless of which service you choose, your personal information and privileged information is, and always will be, yours. It is, and will be, confidential. Only anonymized information about what we've done to serve you is contributed back to our data model and technology to benefit you and others in the Cooperative moving forward. We may build "private" models and systems that are consulted to perform Aegis services just for you, and that are not used to perform services for other clients. The methods we use to do this are designed to preserve attorney-client privilege and avoid conflicts of interest.
We have systems and processes in place to ensure that we never use data about parties adverse to one another in serving those parties. If you have any questions about this, just ask Aegis.
Whether you use Aegis or Alliance services, you recognize that we can only work with what you tell us, and that's the sole basis for what we recommend to you and do for you. We don't consult third party data sources or relate them to your data. We don't combine our data about you with data from the outside unless you specifically authorize us to implement an integration. We don't research to find more information about you unless you engage (and pay) us to do so. We know what you tell us and nothing more.
It's important that you acknowledge the things we don't know might be important and matter for you, and that only a human lawyer has a shot at helping you figure out what you don't know to say that's important.
We can only offer the pricing we do because things we offer as alternatives to human lawyers are, in legalese, "as is and with all faults." Sometimes the nature of the information you supply can create liabilities, or cause lawyers you work with to create them unknowingly. We'll do the best we can for you as long as you acknowledge that sometimes that won't be perfect and you're willing to assume that risk.
As lawyers, we often meet potential clients that want us to make something happen for much less than it costs, or want us to give them some validation that what they wish were true is true - even when it's not. We're proud of our software and the amazing things we can do, but even with help from Aegis, we're lawyers, not magicians. We can't make problems disappear, or alter reality.
We're here to democratize access to legal services and information - that means quality services, and truthful information.
Our ethics matter to us, and we will not (and we work to ensure our software does not) help you break the law, defraud anyone, or abuse the legal system. We believe there are too many people abusing the legal system already.
We provide affordable services, not “cheap” services. We recruit high-quality attorneys for our Alliance and insist on paying them what they are worth, and we keep the prices lower for clients through the efficiencies we build for clients and lawyers in the Cooperative.
We believe in fair, uniform pricing that rewards user contributions to our collective. Our standard subscription price is determined based on (1) your order of subscription, to reward greater contributions and (2) the level of service you request. We may offer scholarships to drive equity in legal services.
We’ll tell you honestly what your budget can and cannot buy. When doing custom legal work with our lawyers, they will advise you to the best of their ability given the budget you express, if any. It is your responsibility to communicate budget constraints, and it is our responsibility to tell you honestly if we cannot meet them.
At Story LLP, we believe in the power of community and shared experiences to create a more equitable legal system. Our cooperative approach combines professional legal services with community-driven support to help underestimated individuals and the companies they create and operate get the legal assistance they deserve.