
Understand contracts before you sign them - lawgeex
https://www.lawgeex.com
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joshuaheard
As a lawyer, I am always excited to see innovation in the legal space. This
seems like an interesting concept: using an algorithm to summarize a document
(contract) and to flag unusual clauses. Put the document in, and out comes the
legal blessing.

However, I am a little concerned about the viability of this concept in terms
of producing a valuable analysis. A true analysis considers the context of a
document. For instance, a one-year term is a common residential lease clause.
However, what if the tenant was under a 6 month employment contract and needed
to change locations? The algorithm would not know this and would not flag the
clause. Or what if the tenant was 17 years old and couldn't legally sign
contracts in the first place?

Sometimes interpretation of a contract comes down to the exact wording of a
contract. Most boilerplate language is the result of years of evolution and
precedent. A summary might subtly change or obscure the meaning.

Finally, you are getting very close, if not into, the unauthorized practice of
law. I recommend contacting your state bar association for feedback.

That being said, I input my email address into your website and look forward
to monitoring your progress.

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Chevalier
Fellow JD here.

I have to disagree with you re: viability. Not only does most of our work lend
itself well to automation (discovery, researching precedent, and predicting
case outcomes), but this particular startup is aimed squarely at the most
obvious domain where humans mostly aren't needed anymore: formulating
contracts. Translating boilerplate legalese into natural language and running
both parties through checklists of essential elements seems like an obvious
solution to an expensive problem. I really don't see why 99% of contracts
can't be automated outside of high-level practice.

Nor do I really understand your examples. I can't recall the last time anyone
I know hired a lawyer to sign a rental agreement, nor do I see any reason why
contract software wouldn't first check that both parties are legally
competent.

Finally, I'm pretty uncomfortable with the idea that "if you automate our
profession, our protectionist guild will go after you." You're not wrong, and
it would be wise for LawGeex to stay wary -- of all trades, the lawyers are
going to fight tooth and nail to stay relevant -- but startups like LawGeex or
RocketLawyer are clearly far more in the public interest than our ludicrously
expensive middleman services. We may as well ban self-driving cars because the
Teamsters want to keep dangerous, error-prone human truckers.

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joshuaheard
Yes, you would have to have some sort of questionnaire for the user to
complete, along the lines of the TurboTax wizards or legal document assembly
software, with questions based on the algorithm's analysis of the contract. I
didn't see anything like that on the website, but it is certainly doable. At
the moment, the website is only accepting residential real estate contracts
which is why I used them as an example.

As a member of the State Bar of California, I can only wish it acted as a
guild protecting my interests. Quite the contrary, it has an adversarial
relationship with its members from overseeing the attorney discipline system
to enforcing continuing education rules. It is more about consumer protection
than attorney protection. I see your point, though.

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pdkl95
We have the ability to calculate a rough estimate of the time required to read
a given text. This means we can create a law that states that for a contract
to be valid, each party must be given at least 80% of that time[1] for the
contract to be considered valid.

Don't want to give the necessary 30-60min? Don't write so long of a contract,
or figure out a way to do without.

[1] 20% is to remove any margin of error in the calculation; the exact amount
is configurable

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jamesk_au
There's no need for such a law.[1] If you haven't read it, or if you don't
understand it, don't sign it. Problem solved.

If you don't have the confidence to ask for time to consider or seek advice
about a contract you've been asked to sign, that is a different problem.

[1] In some jurisdictions there is a statutory 'cooling off' period for
particular classes of contract (eg five business days for the sale of
residential property) during which the purchaser can decide not to proceed,
but there is no such need in relation to commercial transactions generally.

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falcolas
Have you read and understood the T&C for Hacker News? How about your ISP? The
captive portal in your local coffee shop? Your computer's/phone's OS upgrades?
Your car's ECM (it's probably buried in the user manual)?

We encounter too many of these on a daily basis, on things required simply to
participate in modern life, to read/understand the vast majority of them.

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jamesk_au
The proposition that it is impractical to read and understand every contract
we enter into does not present a need for a law invalidating or avoiding every
contract where insufficient time to read and understand it is not given. I
think the only consequence of the proposed law (if that proposition is
correct) would be to destroy contractual certainty for a time; the premise
denies that anyone would actually use the period of time for its intended
purpose.

I also only referred to contracts that are signed. Signatures are important:
as a general rule, you are taken to have read and understood the terms of any
contract you have signed. If you agree to the terms of a contract without
signing (eg many of the examples you mention, or oral acceptance, or clicking
a button) there is generally no such assumption. Whether that will afford you
any greater measure of relief if you later want to get out of the contract
depends on the individual case, but there are circumstances in which it will.

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mootothemax
I'm always shocked by the number of people who don't read the contracts they
sign.

It's one thing if you have hundreds of pages of legalese in front of you - I
can see the value of a service such as this, or hiring your own lawyer for
such cases - but for a few pages, five minutes of your time max, I just don't
understand why so many people don't take the time to do so.

One habit I've noticed in highly successful people is that they don't skim
over bits of contracts (something I'm certainly guilty of); everything is read
_in detail_.

Does anyone have any anecdotal stories about successful people _not_ taking 10
minutes to read a contract?

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kyle_t
I think there are two things at play here.

1\. People perceive they don't have a choice. For example when you visit the
doctor and you have to sign 12 different form/contracts. Most people believe
they either sign them or don't get treated.

2\. Fear of not understanding. They think they wouldn't understand they
legalese even if they tried, so why even bother? Personally I don't blame
them. I've read contracts that were so wordy and had so much legalese in them
you'd be convinced the lawyers wrote them that way just so everyone involved
would need to hire as many lawyers as possible simply to understand the darn
thing.

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CPLX
I think a grossly underutilized tactic is learning the art of quickly reading
and red-lining a contract. Meaning you go through line by line and cross out
particularly nasty lines or clauses, or make quick edits, and then initial
next to the changes. Then sign at the bottom and hand it back.

It's a habit I picked up from being in the music business for years,
specifically being a concert promoter in my early 20's, where it's absolutely
standard and normal practice to get a contract, red-line or change the stuff
that doesn't apply or doesn't work for you, and return it. A good example
would be striking language like "or for any other reason" at the end of a
cancellation clause, or changing terms from perpetuity to 12 months, stuff
like that.

I've since done it at doctor's offices, when renting or buying things, when
signing a simple freelancing contract, and many other contexts. It's much less
confrontational, after all you do sign it and hand it back to them, putting
the onus on them to deal with it if it's a problem. I recommend this approach
highly if you're the type to care.

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mahyarm
Don't they usually contain things like. "Any changes to this standard contract
have to be approved by the CEO of LargeCorp in writing, otherwise it is
invalid". And every change has to be initialed by has to be initialed by both
parties.

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jpatokal
In that case the entire contract is invalid and _neither_ party is bound by
it.

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jmuhlich
I think a sample report (from a fictitious but plausible contract) would be
helpful to clearly explain what the service does.

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lawgeex
Thank you for the idea. We were thinking of adding a short video or
screenshots when we release the updated Beta version of LawGeex

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julius
I really hope this (or something like it) will succeed. There are so many
situations, where a lawyer would be helpful, but is too much of a hassle to
get involved (often because they are expensive).

AI lawyers giving plain language information and indicating areas where you
want to get a real lawyer involved sound pretty neat.

@lawgeex: Your Headline with the Register-Button is weirdly aligned to the
left in my browser (Win+FF), not sure if this is intentional. It looks wrong,
as all the following sections are well centered.

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jmuguy
I had you analyze the monster 37 page lease I just signed for a new apartment.
It looked mostly boilerplate to me with several addendums attached. I'm not
sure your engine was able to process the PDF, it just sort of spit back a page
of "issues" that were garbled text and weird characters. I can't seem to get
back to the page I was on now either.

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lawgeex
Hi Thank you for trying to upload your monster 37 page lease :) I apologise
that LawGeex didn't work. So that we can figure out why it didn't work, I
would really appreciate if you can email PDF to contactlg@lawgeex.com so that
our tech team can take a look at it. Many thanks

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grabeh
Interesting premise. I often wonder about liability issues in these kind of
intermediary cases. The tenant signs agreement on basis of plain English
summary. Landlord seeks to enforce agreement. Subsequently it turns out there
is an error in the summarisation process and an important clause was missed or
incorrectly summarised. Yes, the tenant will be liable to the landlord but a
cause of action may be available against the intermediary.

Clearly the intermediary will have various disclaimers in their terms of use
but that doesn't greatly assist the tenant and reduces the value of the
proposition from the tenant's perspective. Certain disclaimers may be unlawful
under consumer protection law also.

I tried to upload the following as a .docx document but got the 'Unsupported
document' error.

    
    
      RESIDENTIAL LEASE
    
      Landlord permits you to stay in the property for 6 months from 1 January 2016.
      In consideration you agree to provide Landlord with your firstborn within 30 days of his/her birth, or in the absence of children prior to 1 December 2020, $1,000,000 no later than 1 January 2021.
    
      ………………………………….
      Landlord
    
      ……………………………………
      Tenant
    

As an aside, as a site extolling the virtues of plain English in agreements, I
would have thought you could have put some effort into providing plain English
terms of use.

Finally, any stats on the territory breakdown between the 60k documents that
have been uploaded? Would be fascinated to see this!

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davedx
> Currently, Lawgeex only supports residential lease agreements

Sadface.

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uiri
I feel like this would be great from employment contracts and nondisclosure
agreements where the asymmetry of the situation is rather large and, depending
on the company, the contract may actually be long enough to warrant a
professional analysis. Of course, collecting multiple contracts from the same
employer would help with pointing out what is actually unusual/normal (for
that particular employer).

Residential leases seems like one of the worst contract markets to start off
with. Firstly, because what is legal and illegal to put in a lease varies from
place to place. For instance, in Ontario, it is illegal to collect a security
deposit (a deposit may be collected but it can only be used towards last
month's rent). Secondly, what is normal and what is unusual will also vary,
most likely on a much finer grained level (ie: by city/town rather than by
state/province). Thirdly, you'll have to deal with leases from less-than-
professional landlords (e.g. using a lease drafted according to the rather
different laws of a different province/state). Fourthly, the lease will vary a
lot depending on the landlord (ie: large property management company vs small
property manager vs individual owner-landlord) and the accomodations (ie:
house vs condo vs apartment).

Lastly, few residential leases need to be more than about 5 pages long,
including all the things the landlord has added over the years after being
burned by various bad tenants. If there is a problem, the landlord and tenant
will either resolve it or: if the landlord wants the tenant to move out,
either it is easy to evict or it is difficult to evict but nothing in the
lease will change that that much and if the tenant wants to move out, they
will break the lease and good luck to the landlord suing the tenant trying to
get the money back (the tenant risks very little by breaking the lease if they
are not going to rely on the current landlord as a reference for future
landlords). I doubt there is a special clause which can be put into a
residential lease which will make it more difficult for the tenant to break
it.

Then again, I rarely find legalese which I can't parse (although sometimes it
seems written in such a way that it will take me a full five minutes) so
perhaps I'm not in the target market for this kind of service.

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antihero
I tried to upload a PDF and a TXT file and it said they were both unsupported
:(

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ccvannorman
This is a GODSEND. Legalese has long been used to irritate and take advantage
of customers who don't have time to read every contract. Short of rewriting
the laws to require plain english overviews of contracts, this is the next
best thing!

Great work guys!

Note: I didn't click on the link the first 3 times I saw it because (of the
title) I assumed it was an article telling me I ought to read contracts ;-]

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song
I clicked on Register Now and got a 404 page.

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lawgeex
Hi I am sorry that you experienced a 404 page error message. Our tech team is
investigating the problem.

Thanks for reporting the problem

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yvoschaap2
It's caused by (some) ad blockers because you call ga() (google analytics) in
your javascript which loads through google tag manager which is blocked from
loading by default with uBlock for example. This all causing the modal window
to not show, leading to a catch error forwarding to your 404 page.

~~~
lawgeex
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. You are 100% correct and we
fixed the problem

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PeterWhittaker
Interesting. NOTE: With cookies disabled, a 404 page is displayed. That's very
confusing.

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_jomo
> @2015 LawGeex. All Rights Reserved

Not sure if that's a typo, but I like it. It's different.

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alphydan
Tried a PDF and a .docx and got an << Unsupported document type >> error.

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lawgeex
Hi thank you for uploading a doc. Currently we only support residential
leases. If you were uploading a residential lease and got this message, i
would appreciate if you could email me the doc contactlg@lawgeex.com so our
tech team can investigate.

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api
Just the title of this is along the lines of "check if the crocodile is real
or plastic before sticking your head in its mouth."

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elliottwilliams
looks a lot like what I built with NLP months ago:

[https://freelancers.legalsifter.com/](https://freelancers.legalsifter.com/)

[http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/07/legalsifter-helps-
designers...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/07/legalsifter-helps-designers-
and-developers-read-their-contracts/)

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digitalengineer
"LawGeex compares your legal document to thousands of others in our database"
They should start selling those as well.

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cowsandmilk
Probably cannot. Many databases of this type are constructed with
confidentiality agreements.

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mike_ivanov
Just have tried to register, got this:

Server Error in '/' Application. The resource cannot be found.

Firefox/Mac.

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lawgeex
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. Our tech team will look into
this.

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bdg
I tried to register and was taken to a broken page.

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lawgeex
Hi Apologies for the error message. What browser/OS are you using and have you
tried registering again? thanks a lot

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bdg
Chrome/Manjaro, both at the latest.

I haven't tried registering again, the contract I wanted reviewed expires in a
few hours so I picked a different method.

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cdnsteve
Register seems to be crashing under load.

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jas78
Same here...

