Expert systems and the legal world
legaltechnology.com
legaltechnology.com
For instance, instead of using an expert system to generate a contract that says "Alice will pay Bob $2000 a month in rent, plus utilities," you could write a contract that says "The party listed on line 1 of the attached form will pay the party listed on line 2 of the form the amount listed on line 3 of the form; if the checkbox on line 4 of the form is checked, then the first party will also pay for utilities."
Then the attached form could look something like this:
1. Name of tenant: _______
2. Name of landlord: ______
3. Amount of rent: $_____
4. [ ] Check here if tenant pays for utilities
That solution would seem to be much more efficient and transparent than using an expert system; essentially, the "templating" is being done by the judges and/or lawyers reading the contract, not by an expert system writing one.
Edit: of course any such contract might contain a lot of "conditional logic" that would only apply in very specific circumstances and thus would prove irrelevant for most users. But although the contract would be long, you'd only need to write it once, and there would only be one copy to maintain.
basically you answers a questionnaire (with conditions betweens questions like "ask this question only if A and B are both physical person with revenue < 20000 euros a years")
and at the end these answers are used to generate a template (with things like "put this paragraph as many times as they are people involved" )
the templates and questionnaires were made once (and updated every once in a while when law changed) by a specialist.
One could even imagine those "universal contracts" being open-source, if you could find a business model.
What you're proposing also bucks 100+ years of legal writing tradition (both in US and Europe), which itself is very poorly received by attorneys and judges.
Example: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/isda-master-agreement.a... (master agreement for derivatives trading)
More discussion of two-party master agreements: https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin... (my course materials)
Incorporation by reference: https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/Notes-on-Contract-Draftin... (ditto)
Everyone preferred this structure that I dealt with, because the total length of the contracts were dramatically shorter and the structure was much easier to read and comprehend.
I suppose one could just add the addendum of specific terms at the end of the document and both parties sign off on everything in one go, but I certainly wouldn't want to test it in court.
Working on it :)
I've seen B2B contracts like the kind proposed above (the terms as a form attached to a pre-existing contract). They've been a thing for decades; they're just very uncommon and usually aren't used until the businesses already have a pre-existing contractual relationship.
Generally, the integration clause is uncommon in the contracts I've seen; it's used in big-ticket contracts (like M&A) but not so much in day-to-day contracts where friction can kill a transaction.
If tradition keeps us from inventing something better for normal human beings, it's called oppression and/or rent-seeking.
(Or look at English spelling..)
Having been involved in Legal blacklining pissing matches before, probably not between two equal parties. I think the legal terms are as much as a part of the negotiation as the price - "If you want to be indemnified against X, we will have to hire a team to do Y and that will cost an extra $Z" "You want to use our name in publicity, that means we pay Q% less" etc etc.
Yes, you can do that. People have been doing that for decades. Pretty much every major lease or purchase agreement you or your parents have made in the past 4 or 5 decades has used a standardized legal template.
Note that these templates have the variable fields in-line; if you want to do it as a separate document as proposed, you would need to do that as an attachment or exhibit to the original underlying contract. The former is generally required for contracts between businesses and individuals; the latter is uncommon but is used for B2B contracts.
Generally, if there is a significant amount of conditional logic, you would need/want to split that out as a separate (possibly standardized) contract addressing those particular logical conditions. But note that plenty of standardized contracts have conditional blocks that affect the selection of a particular term of the contract (i.e., amount of monthly payment, points paid, choice of extended warranty, etc.).
Since writing contracts was my favorite part of practicing law, I saw that staring at me for a year and noped out. I'm a software developer now, and so much happier.
When I left (2013) a project was underway to add lots of functionality to it. Not sure what the current status is if any.
There are vendors who took this one step further. They define a document "contract" which is populated with the raw business data and other important facts regarding the context of the transaction. You send this XML into their system and it will dynamically construct the required document based upon the inputs and send back the final PDF. Documents produced in this manner usually require far fewer printed/imaged pages, especially when working with business customers and complex retirement accounts that require volumes of potentially inapplicable disclosures.
We have also hand-rolled a lot of this kind of stuff in-house for our customers using HTML templating and PDF conversion. That said, anything that needs to stand up in court comes from one of 2 legal document vendors and we are required to use it pretty much as-is.
He wishes to create such forms, and created PolyForm to try and do so.
https://writing.kemitchell.com/2021/06/23/PolyForm-Commercia...
Even without AI, companies like these don't like to hand out their source code, so you wouldn't be able to trust them anyway. Programmers are not lawyers, no matter how hard we pretend to be sometimes, and unless every programmer on this project was also a judge I wouldn't trust it to advice or make any judgement. You're not going to find judges who happen to run a startup as a side-gig anyway, so let's just bin the idea.
Automated systems are great at reducing the human factor in a lot of things. For stupid factory work where human minds can be put to much more useful tasks, that's great. For the legal system, no thank you.
FWIW, that's precisely one of the things ES are designed to do, to backtrack and introspect, to explain their decision making.
(I did a module on expert systems (blackboard models) back in 1988 when they were a hot topic)
Expert systems are classic AI, often with a rule engine underpinning it. It really could not be simpler in context and this is what makes them good. Everything is simple, the knowledge in it (i.e. the codified expert opinion) is what makes it what it is.
The problem is not the logic, but the shear size of it. That is not at all different from any sufficiently complex piece of software that allows side effects. And the comments can be totally useless or downright misleading anyway.
Also, there may be persons who are professional in both programming and lawyering.
Edit: Spelling, I suffer from severe fat finger syndrom which is compounded by typing specific legastenie.
The UX opportunity is how you apply information from the system. You can’t just accept the output as it is.
Lots of work was done on this problem in the late 80s/early 90s but I don't know what the current SOTA is since expert systems fell out of fashion. I'd expect it to be fairly straightforward to maintain a consistent rule base with modern computers that are 1000x bigger and faster than those of the 80s.
However, it scales as O(D^2) where D is the number of working memory facts.
Maybe not. Maybe they'll just be used to create a rule base that is 1000x bigger than those of the 80s, and you'll still have trouble maintaining consistency.
Companies have various more-or-less self-serving reasons to keep their decision-making process hidden. They will persuade policy-makers that unless they are allowed to keep this information 'proprietary', then 'society' (read: themselves) will not be able to reap the benefits of this technology.
The next step is that the cost of having humans resolve problems becomes 'prohibitive', so any meaningful process of redress is removed through the use of one-sided 'agreements.'
Just look to the big social media companies and telcos to see what can happen when decision-making is automated.
It sounds messy, but it works very well, and the errors aren't muddied by a black box.
Why would it work now after 60 years of not working?
Experts haven't changed.
The software is simple.
Creating expert systems are easy in a child's head, that's why it's a good school assignment, they get to see how quickly it gets out of hand. It's the same as the Semantic Web.
Just making a cake is too hard, why is that not online if expert systems are possible?
Substituting butter for vegetable oil, how much, what sort of vegetable oil, does that work for all cakes? Is it 10% worse as a cake. Do some culture actually like it better one way. Do kids care. Moist or dry matter. How do you translate measurements to stop getting silly results for empirical to metric.
This article and webcast doesn't actually say there exists a working expert system. It will stay that way.
Search is what has filled this gap. Maybe someday it will be AI (Outside of the AI in search)