Detangle: AI-generated summaries of legal docs
detangle.ai
detangle.ai
You say "The summaries are to help inform conversations with actual lawyers", but would a lawyer give a rats ass about a layman's interpretation of an AI-backed translation of a legal doc from a company who "does not guarantee that the stuff on the website is good or works"? IANAL but I don't think so.
A lot of my time will be spent reviewing a diff between the current agreement and the proposed agreement but it’s a 500 page document. I might give this product a try just to see what it spits out. I could see this being incredibly useful if it could write a plain language, non-biased, summary of changes.
Good luck running 500 pages through this thing...
At worst a junior associate at $BIGFIRM would review a document of that length with an understanding of issues specific to your situation, governing law/locality, etc for somewhere around $100 AND this would include a redlined response with suggested edits, annotations, any questions, etc.
A local, friendlier more SMB or startup catering attorney/smaller firm would likely look at a bunch of these for free or close to it.
In short the pricing needs to be at least 1/10 what it is currently so it can (at best) serve as a novelty, a basic filter to a series of potential agreements, etc.
For rate sheet time that's still too much and negotiating down legal invoices is just about the best use of time from a cost-benefit standpoint.
We started talking about the quality and pricing of a ChatGPT bot and ended up here... Point is, given the pricing of Detangle ($10/page) you could hire an attorney down the street with any amount of experience in contract law to review an agreement with better results at equivalent (or cheaper) pricing. At the current state of ChatGPT a paralegal or some random cousin in law school would be better.
If you are conversing with your own lawyer, you should be getting your summary from them, as that way you can be fairly sure it's correct (and you can probably sue them if it's not). That's part of a lawyer's job, explaining the law to their clients.
If you are conversing with someone else's lawyer, and you don't have your own lawyer, you are dangerously close to relying on this software for legal advice, which, given how confidently incorrect AI can be, could end in tears.
Indeed.
We all know what the medical profession quite rightly thinks about patients who turn up having (supposedly) self-diagnosed themselves with the help of Doctor Google.
And we all know what artists think about AI art...they hate it, because it's pretty good and it's going to take a lot of their jobs.
"Doctor Google" is pretty bad but there's absolutely no reason AIs can't get very good at most areas of medicine. For now doctors don't like Google because it gives bad results, but pretty soon they're going to start hating it because it gives good results.
That tool is a human called a Junior Associate.
And, no, you cannot replace a Junior Associate with AI for the reasons already outlined by @kkielhofner below. TL;DR: context... Junior has it. AI doesn't and will never do.
One of the key advantages of the recent advances in AI/ML to me is that it allows users to more efficiently extract unstructured information.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
"Here's a tool for this highly specific purpose!†"
"†Tool not fit for this highly specific purpose."
I’m pretty sure for a contract to be legal both sides need to receive “valuable consideration” (something of value). So, if you get completely screwed over, I think there can be a legal remedy.
But, I don’t think there’s much a court will do if you come out on the losing end of a contract, just based on the terms themselves as long as both parties still received something of value.
After all, it’s unlikely that you’re going to get no consideration in a contractual transaction… but if you get absolutely nothing, sure, the contract could be void for lack of consideration.
Anybody who has been in business-roles that involve reviewing legal documents will tell you that.
TL;DR three things:
1. The AI will NOT tell you if it is the right document for the context, only a lawyer will do that
2. The AI is unlikely to correctly analyse the document, clauses in a legal document have inter-relation with each other and with the general context (perhaps even with other legal documents you have previously signed). That sort of analysis is only something a lawyer can do.
3. Perhaps MOST IMPORTANTLY ... with legal documents, often the important thing is not what is IN the document, but what is NOT IN there. Only a lawyer can tell you what is missing in a legal document AND help you get that missing stuff negotiated into it.
Meanwhile, specifics of the deal and the broader context can also matter, sometime more than the abstractions legal forms tend to deal in. A lawyer may or may not notice those and reason through them.
Paving an AI path over ill-fitting or over-standardized legal terms isn't great for the industry. Neither is reinforcing lawyer monopoly over business knowledge.
Because the "logical end" of an LLM that can match words with other words isn't even close to AGI that actually understands the current version of the relevant law and its specific implications for a specific entity in a specific jurisdiction. But it can spout convincing looking bullshit based on having parsed a load of text with a certain amount of semantic similarity which is completely irrelevant in legal terms.
A random teenager on Reddit who prefaces his posts with "IANAL, but I think..." is closer to the relevant level of understanding of legal documents and jurisdictions than GPT-3, but nobody ever wonders why people don't think teenagers on Reddit are better at offering legal advice than lawyers...
I'm not a lawyer though, so I have no idea if that logic would hold up in court. I'm just guessing that's the rational they are using.
The glosses all seem accurate, if incomplete sometimes. I got a strong sense that they had been reviewed/polished by a human "expert". That might explain the pricing.
I didn't find the glosses much clearer than the original, just shorter. The Google legalese I read was fairly clear. With the document being a legal contract, it's obviously vital to understand the legalese.
I'd be impressed by an AI that can read an employment contract, and say "Whoah! Clause 31-B(ii) is implicitly asking you to sign your descendants into servitude in perpetuity! Perhaps you should take a look!", or "Did you notice that all benefits are contingent on stuff beyond your control?". I'd probably have paid $25 for that, because I've never had a lawyer scan my employment contract. I read them myself, but IANAL.
As someone (no legal background) who has to read legal documents sometimes (perks of being a founder cough) and would take advice (yet) from an AI over a lawyer; the above would give me enough of an idea how exposed we are or not and if a lawyer should be contacted. I can read legalise quite well (perks of having been a founder for 35 years), but if its 100s of pages, I need to be able to ask questions about the doc to get an idea of where I stand. Which is why I would hire a lawyer to do a review after I send them my questions anyway.
It told me that it would cost $123 USD to summarize...
It also told me:
>"This document summary is not legal advice or legally binding in any way. You should consult a lawyer."
Opinion:
A Lawyer would cost me less... <g>
(Perhaps I could get a cheaper rate if I uploaded the Magna Carta or The Twelve Tables (of Ancient Rome) or the Ten Commandments or Newton's Three Laws -- or the Two Laws of Richard J Maybury:
o Do all you have agreed to do
o Do not encroach on other persons or their property
)
All I know is, $123 is too expensive for me -- and,
What if the AI takes the Law -- and interprets it all wrong?
?
???
The ideal system would highlight (sets of) text that that's common between both documents and underline text that is original. Or vice versa.
"The ideal system would highlight (sets of) text that that's common between both documents and underline text that is original. Or vice versa."
Just change your settings in microsoft word.
Here's the YC SAFE, for example: https://detangle.ai/examples/yc-safe
I also intentionally didn't just give an output of the summary but instead showed it next to each paragraph so the implication isn't that the summaries replaces the legal, but rather tries to clarify.
Glad you noticed the Terms. :)
> We may suspend or terminate your right to use our website and terminate these Terms of Service immediately upon written notice to you for any breach of these Terms of Service.
From the summary:
> We can end this agreement any time we want.
I read these as being quite different? The original text says they can only terminate for a breach by the user of the ToS, not simply "any time we want".
I get that the service isn't supposed to replace actual legal advice but surely differences as glaring as these limit the usefulness of the summaries.
> [Investor Name] gave [Company Name] the right to certain shares of its Capital Stock in exchange for [Amount] on [Date].
This is backwards
> The Post-Money Valuation Cap is a number that is written in Section 2.
This isn't true, the number is here, "additional defined terms" are later.
If you sell me a summary of a legal document, which was advertised as being useful to understand the legal document, that seems like just about the most straightforward case of legal advice I can imagine.