
Idea: an open platform for generating custom legal contracts - guptaneil
http://openideas.ideon.co/2011/cure-for-jurisdyslexia-discovered?
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nyellin
I suggested this to a lawyer I respect once and he suggested I write a program
to do my programming.

We discussed the concept in depth, and it might be more complex than you
realize. Templates are one thing, but you probably can't "mixin" different
clauses without generating legalese based on inter-clause dependencies...

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calcnerd256
Or it might be as easy as writing a compiler. These things are hard to
prejudge.

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Animus7
Compiler writing is easy? No. (I've built compilers for large subsets of C and
Java, as well as my own languages)

Lord help you if you try to write a perfectly conforming compiler for C++ (has
it ever been done?), and the U.S. legal system is _at least_ an order of
magnitude more complex than that.

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a3camero
To make that task even more complicated, people don't agree on what many of
the rules are. Your "law compiler" would have to take in input and have output
that's maybe this, or more likely this, but it could also be this...

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pents90
Docracy (<http://docracy.com>) is a repository of crowd-sourced legal
documents, designed for scenarios such as this. As others mention, it is very
difficult to reliably construct working contracts from a cookbook of clauses.
A sounder approach is to have a variety of complete templates, along with some
community discussion and social proof of their worth.

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ianstormtaylor
One thing to remember is that contracts depend on trust. Not only between you
and the party signing, But also between you and your lawyer.

To succeed, the service would have to be trustworthy enough that I wouldn't
feel the need to have a lawyer "double-check" the contract first. You could
argue that just having a lawyer proofread the document would be far less
costly though I guess.

It will take a lot of trust to get a service to the levels of trust required
for some contracts. One mistake and you could be screwed.

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jacques_chester
Lawyers sort of have this stuff already. They tend to be fill-in-the-blank
templates originally built around WordPerfect.

But the law is, dare I mention this, heinously complex. Why? Because the
_world_ is heinously complex. Law has to deal with everything and everyone;
its subject domains cover all human activity.

One of the reasons lawyers stick to lawyerly gobbledigook is risk management.
Various phrases and terms are embedded in lawyer-drafted documents because
their meaning has been tested in court. They're known forms of words with
known legal consequences.

If you turn law into a write-compile process (I once proposed this[1] and I
was not the first), you run a series of new risks. The most dangerous being:
which document is the "real" contract? Even if you include language saying
"the generated document", too bad, the court might not agree.

Remember: every software system grows progressively more complex as it a)
grows the boundaries of its domain coverage to remedy impedance mismatches and
b) discovers strange and nasty corner cases.

Well the law is analogous, with the difference that the law has been hacked on
for (in common law countries) for nearly a thousand years, including some very
large patches.

It's complex because it's essentially complex.

[1] <http://clubtroppo.com.au/2007/08/25/programming-in-legal/>

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sunchild
I've put many hundreds of hours into making my forms simple and to the point.
I've considered dropping them into a public github repo, under a simple
attribution license. I'd really like to have other people fork them and make
pull requests for corrections/improvements.

Is there any interest in that?

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dtsingletary
A company called Microsystems used to have a product named D3:
<http://www.microsystems.com/pdfs/d3-success-stories.pdf>

Unfortunately, they had to discontinue the product, in part due to a patent
dispute Microsoft lost about how it uses XML in Word, if I remember properly.

A solution like this needs to be flexible and allow the logic to be diverted
by humans, but is a brilliant thing for real estate and other industries that
are full of common books of contracts and rules.

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Facens
We're doing this right now at <http://www.iubenda.com> and Privacy Policies
are our starting point. Anyway, I can assure you that's far from being simple
:) Here you can see a sneak peek of the upcoming new version:
[http://www.iubenda.com/blog/2011/10/12/a-brand-new-
version-s...](http://www.iubenda.com/blog/2011/10/12/a-brand-new-version-
sneak-peek/) :)

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kylebragger
Not sure how far off the mark this is, but Paperlex[1] could be interesting to
check out.

1\. <https://paperlex.com/>

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siculars
I second <https://paperlex.com>. I was at GA/NYC a week or two back when they
publicly demoed for the first time. It was very impressive. Think markdown for
legal documents. The most interesting thing about it, imho, was not the
structured templating but the counter party signature mechanics. All done
online and driven by the data in the document.

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drewda
As far as legal contracts and forms for start-ups go, Orrick offers a "start-
up tool kit":
[http://www.orrick.com/practices/corporate/emergingCompanies/...](http://www.orrick.com/practices/corporate/emergingCompanies/startup/index.asp)

I'm not sure if their license allows you to modify and redistribute.

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desireco42
I had similar idea, most of the time I get cookie-cutter contracts and having
a service that would provide additional value as vault would be useful

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desireco42
to which Paperlex seems to answer almost exactly... good work

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chadk
What about <http://contractual.ly> ?

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drstrangevibes
making a contract is fine but how can you enforce effectivly against someone
who breaches the contract, imho a effective system would be able to produce
initial drafts of litigation documents based on the contractual clauses
breached, otherwise people will just break the contracts willy-nilly and
you'll be forced to enter litigation yourself, or take your computer generated
documents to a lawyer

