Idea: an open platform for generating custom legal contracts
openideas.ideon.co
openideas.ideon.co
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...
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.
A good lawyer avoids internal cross-references. They're like the GOTO of contracts. On the other hand, lawyers treat "sections" the way programmers treat "methods" – each section is supposed serve a discrete function, and can be leveraged via cross-references to avoid repetition. So you have a tension between DRYing up the contract language and increasing inter-clause dependancies.
Contract assembly technology is pretty useless in my practice, since I'm most often reacting to the other side's agreement form. It's easy to implement basic Madlib-style contract templates, but in the end it's even easier to just edit a Word or text file. After all, as soon as the other side gets your draft, they make changes, and all your precious metadata goes pretty much out the window.
I'm more interested in tools that help me make smart decisions based on best practices, and what options/risks I ought to consider based on a completely arbitrary contract input.
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.
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/
Is there any interest in that?
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.
I'm not sure if their license allows you to modify and redistribute.