Hacker News Reader

Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Given how confident AI can be when it's incorrect, it feels like a bit of a problem to use AI with legal docs, since you can't really trust it to be correct (and the cost of being incorrect may be absurdly high).

View on HN

Given how _poorly written_ a lot of real legal documents are, I would definitely not trust any current AI to summarize it accurately. How would it handle documents where terms or clauses are in conflict, or any other situation where a close-reading human would have to step back and say "okay, this is _semantically_ impossible?"

I could see a tool like this being valuable as an outline generator for long documents, but I would be very reluctant to believe any statements it makes about the actual legal effects.

I could see this being useful as a tool that scans legal documents in bulk like Terms of Service and looks for red flags that simple keyword searches would miss.

Could definitely be a useful tool to improve something like ToSDR

I’ve had ChatGPT tell me how to do something one way, and then give an example that omitted the specific syntax it had called out. It was only until I told it that the example didn’t reflect what it wrote that it basically said ‘oops! Here’s the corrected version’. I can’t even begin to imagine how poorly that could go in a legal context.

With chatgpt, with the little toy project I am trying that uses it, I default prompt it (automatically) that is is wrong and please provide a better version. I will generate a few versions that get better. Mind you that I don’t tell it what was wrong saying ‘this does not include all the points I asked’. It will say ‘oops, here is a version that includes all you asked’. And that a 3-4 times in a row.

As a NLP researcher at a well known place & working on this, I totally 100% agree with you, this is ultra dangerous and should not be used, straight up, on anything remotely serious

What is the best approach to building something like this? Do you work at HF?

Did you look at it? It summarises per-paragraph and the correctness can largely be verified by a layperson.

This seems targeted at the low end of the market, where the alternative is simply to not read a ToS, EULA, etc.

I highly doubt the low end of the market will pay anything close to what this service wants to charge.

Wouldn't no information be preferable to wrong information in most cases?

Agreed, I would still want a lawyer to take a look or anything of importance.

I also would want a lawyer to take a look. Hence the note saying to talk to a lawyer. ;)

The reality is, even knowing what to ask a lawyer can be difficult and it's not economically viable to ask a lawyer to summarize a 100-page legal document into text you can wrap your head around.

Detangle just helps give some clarity so that you can further a conversation with a lawyer, or even just ask for clarification from the person who sent you the document.

"Hey, this paragraph seems to imply XYZ...is that the case?"

I'm making zero claims that this should replace a lawyer or be used as a replacement for legally binding text.

> even knowing what to ask a lawyer can be difficult

That's the lawyer's job, to guide you through ! If they're not doing that, then find a different lawyer.

The whole point is we are talking about legal document review here.

Reviewing legal documents necessarily involves an active discussion with a lawyer, it is not something you can turn up with pre-prepared questions for.

> That's the lawyer's job, to guide you through ! If they're not doing that, then find a different lawyer.

Yes! And if you happen to know that, and have a good lawyer, then you're all set. But a hell of a lot of lawyers won't volunteer to do this, or aren't competent enough to have this conversation productively with a layperson, and most people don't know to ask for it.

I have my doubts as to the practicality, but a tool that could summarize and then prompt laypeople go to their lawyer to start that discussion seems like it could definitely have value. I suspect most people interested in this tool may already be knowledgeable enough to ask for a walkthrough anyway, but you could imagine implementations where the summary is presented directly, and could guide more people toward the help they need.

> competent enough to have this conversation productively with a layperson

HUH ? That is literally their job !

Legal document review is bread and butter for lawyers.

Having productive conversations with laypeople is what lawyers do all day every day.

I really don't get your point.

If a lawyer is unable to have a productive conversation with a layperson about a legal document, then they need to be stripped of their qualifications.

There are plenty of lawyers who are not competent at their jobs, but can be convincing to uninformed laypeople.

That’s not their job - their job is to make persuasive legal arguments, craft legal language to be ironclad, etc. Similarly a top researchers in CS isn’t employed for their ability to explain CS, despite the fact we employ them to do just that.

That's true, but you still should (try to) be prepared. Meeting with a lawyer will go much more smoothly if you have at least a rudimentary understanding of the subject matter, rather than having them explain everything to you from first principles.

And you can also waste half the time having the lawyer explain to you that what detangle told you was wrong...

Question: how much would it cost to consult a lawyer about a 100 page document? How does one even go about doing something like this? I've never really needed to do that, so I'm genuinely curious.

You call a lawyer up, tell them what you need, and the lawyer will either give you an estimate, or agree to a cost, and send you an engagement letter.

> The reality is, even knowing what to ask a lawyer can be difficult and it's not economically viable to ask a lawyer to summarize a 100-page legal document into text you can wrap your head around.

A 100 page legal document (i.e. one with lots of stuff implied by structure and lots of specific subconditions and lots of case-specific stuff that might make more sense in conjunction with the examples in the appendix) sounds like the sort of thing AI would be wrong about far more often than it was right...

At least reading a short contract or EULA I'd be pretty confident an AI-based system would have lots of similar contracts and plain English explanations in its corpus and correctly identify the boilerplate exclusions and even if it misinterpreted stuff like IP assignments and ability to modify the agreement it might be slightly better than Ctrl-F at figuring out which clauses do this. Although from what I can see the current incarnation is working on a paragraph by paragraph basis so doesn't even necessarily apply definitions defined in the section above correctly...

The AI couldn't even get the directionality of the first paragraph of the YCombinator SAFE, it's in this thread.