past

LexClinic alpha was a successful minimum viable potential-charity:

1. We walked many new web3 projects through our $300 legal risk checklist and 2 hour legal information session based on the project's answers to the checklist:

• This enabled these web3 projects to make informed decisions about their legal future.

• It also taught law students how to properly interview projects about their legal needs and how to expand past not just thinking rationally about what the law means, which is taught in law schools, but also thinking creatively about how to ethically achieve the project's goals.

• After going through the checklist, many projects progressed onto starting the 501(c)3 charity designation process with the pro bono support of one of the best law firms in our industry.

2. We did some open source general legal research at low cost:

• An obvious value-add since law students already spend quite a bit of their time doing legal research. The Clinic's research opportunities exposed them to key players in our industry as well as key concepts in our industry.

3. Big picture:

• We figured out how to further our core value that law is a public good but is in a tragedy of the commons that needs to be rejuvenated.

• We will likely be considered an educational charity when we are ready to make the request during our transition to beta, while also doing actual applied work that has a big prosocial impact on prosocial impact projects.

4. Insights:

• After speaking with and learning from our friends at Endaoment, we realized that the accounting requirements for 501(c)3 status are too advanced for our alpha stage, and that we needed an accountable managerial layer in order to meet 501(c)3 requirements.

• Trade schools teach with journeyperson apprenticeships, and in many jurisdictions this is still how lawyers learn to practice law. We can take this applied learning methodology and use it to low-cost help prosocial impact projects in an environment where legal costs are often unethically high.

• We do not offer any confidentiality, and all projects work together in the open. This helps ensure projects do not try, on purpose or accidentally, to get legal services at the Clinic.

• We learned to use the Clinic itself for legal engineering experiments, so-called dogfooding, as a safe way to take on applied legal engineering work. For instance, our Hats Tree that is continuing to be built as we transition from alpha to beta.

We now have barred lawyers who graduated from LexClinic alpha! By being apprentices at the Clinic, they are Web3 literate lawyers.

present

We are now transitioning to LexClinic beta:

1. We have the Ixian Tech law firm managing the Clinic, so that we can ensure projects do not detrimentally rely on students.

• One of the problems we experienced during the alpha stage was that we should in no way interfere with student academic performance while also being responsible with projects.

2. The Clinic is now a $300/yr subscription or invite Patronage managed by Hats Protocol.

• This makes onboarding simpler, and in theory should be easier to build out as a protocol so we can continue being as decentralized as is reasonable.

3. Houses are deemphasized for now.

• Critical mass was not big enough in the alpha stage to develop a 'surname legacy' culture, but we did successfully integrate existing projects as houses into the Clinic that wanted to use the Clinic's protocol for business logic, so we'll continue doing that.

4. We are going to administer the inverted-precedent legal engineering grant invention.

• The Clinic's test pilots should be a good fit for properly testing this important rough consensus and wisdom cultivating over time concept.

5. We are going to expand our open sourcing of Hats Protocol resources.

• For instance, during this transition from alpha to beta, we have developed a mutual consent Hats system, including the boilerplate legal that handles novel liabilities because of the Remote Procedure Call "RPC" nature of "Ethereum Virtual Machine" EVM systems.