Introduction

There's a common misperception that many non-lawyers have about how legal contracts are written. Most people probably assume that a lawyer writes each contract from scratch, but in reality the lawyer is most likely copy and pasting clauses and sections from already-existing contracts and modifying them for their particular client.

One of the resources lawyers often turn to for this is Law Insider. Founded in 2010, Law Insider indexes the millions of contracts that have been uploaded to the SEC website by publicly traded companies. It generates over 4 million monthly pageviews and has over 250,000 registered users, about 5,000 of which pay $30 a month to access its archives.

I recently interviewed the site's co-founder Preston Clark about how he and his partner came up with the idea, what they did to build up its massive audience, and why they're expanding into a full-fledged media company that produces everything from articles to YouTube videos.