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Understand contracts before you sign them

lawgeex.com

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Re: Understand contracts before you sign them

#51

Post by pdkl95 »

jamesk_au wrote: post #48
pdkl95 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, the "cooling off" periods you mention should cover the "minimum time" requirements that I'm suggesting. The devil is in the details, of course, but such periods where the contract being negotiated can still be called off would account for my concerns. As for the rest of contract law, this very thread exists because of the problem of people not actually reading contracts. We can't make people read them, and…

I understand the concern, and I agree that real problems arise - relatively often - when people don't take the time to read and understand contracts before they sign them. I don't have any data for the following assertion, but I would hazard a guess that the reason most people don't read contracts is not that they do not have the time to read them, but that they do not want to take the time to read them. I think buil…

> incentivise people to take the time to read

That, technically, is not what I'm proposing.

I suggest a burden on businesses or other parties that want to require a contract, in the form of a forced delay roughly proportional to the length/complexity of the contract they wish to use.

In practice, I expect businesses will find this unacceptable[1]. They would therefor work to find some alternative solution.

It might be that there wasn't a need for contracts in some situations, or that the contract language could be made much simpler/shorter. Alternatively, maybe a handful of "well known" standard contracts could become popular, similar in style to the Creative Commons licenses.

We cannot (and should not) avoid complex contracts entirely, but we might be able to fix a lot of common "simple" situations that shouldn't use a complex contract that few people read. By setting up the time burden, I expect complex contract (that might already have a "cooling off" period) wouldn't be significantly affected, but everyday small-time stuff will be incentivised to move away from the current practice of throwing usually-one-sided legalease at everything.

[1] I have often heard that the reason our current credit card system hasn't been updated to something with actual security (chip+pin, one time numbers, some sort of callback system, etc) is that any of these better methods would slow down transactions, resulting in less sales. Regardless of this being true or not, I'm attempting to utilize the perception.

Re: Understand contracts before you sign them

#52

Post by Lawtonfogle »

pdkl95 wrote: post #35
ta75757 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read or understand? This is legalese we're talking about.

Understanding is beyond the scope of what I'd like to see fixed in contract law. The idea is that if you have a 5 page contract, it should have taken at least 8 minutes[1] to read regardless of if it is legalease or written in a plain style. It's a lower bound. Failure to satisfy that bound can then be seen as prima facie evidence that the has not been a "meeting of the minds", due to one party being given sufficient…

So effectively, the individual signing must spend 8 minutes doing nothing but looking at the contract (even if they are daydreaming). I can see where this is would be a concrete improvement, even if just a minor one to a much larger problem.

Re: Understand contracts before you sign them

#53

Post by Lawtonfogle »

pdkl95 wrote: post #35
ta75757 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read or understand? This is legalese we're talking about.

Understanding is beyond the scope of what I'd like to see fixed in contract law. The idea is that if you have a 5 page contract, it should have taken at least 8 minutes[1] to read regardless of if it is legalease or written in a plain style. It's a lower bound. Failure to satisfy that bound can then be seen as prima facie evidence that the has not been a "meeting of the minds", due to one party being given sufficient…

So effectively, the individual signing must spend 8 minutes doing nothing but looking at the contract (even if they are daydreaming). I can see where this is would be a concrete improvement, even if just a minor one to a much larger problem.

Re: Understand contracts before you sign them

#54

Post by Lawtonfogle »

dalke wrote: post #30
mootothemax wrote: post #19

I'm always shocked by the number of people who don't read the contracts they sign. It's one thing if you have hundreds of pages of legalese in front of you - I can see the value of a service such as this, or hiring your own lawyer for such cases - but for a few pages, five minutes of your time max, I just don't understand why so many people don't take the time to do so. One habit I've noticed in highly successful peo…

Software license agreements. Huge numbers of successful people click "ok" and don't read the license at all.

Huge numbers? If I ever met anyone who said they read the full license for all software they use, I would call them a liar.

Re: Understand contracts before you sign them

#55

Post by grabeh »

Interesting premise. I often wonder about liability issues in these kind of intermediary cases. The tenant signs agreement on basis of plain English summary. Landlord seeks to enforce agreement. Subsequently it turns out there is an error in the summarisation process and an important clause was missed or incorrectly summarised. Yes, the tenant will be liable to the landlord but a cause of action may be available against the intermediary.

Clearly the intermediary will have various disclaimers in their terms of use but that doesn't greatly assist the tenant and reduces the value of the proposition from the tenant's perspective. Certain disclaimers may be unlawful under consumer protection law also.

I tried to upload the following as a .docx document but got the 'Unsupported document' error.

  RESIDENTIAL LEASE

  Landlord permits you to stay in the property for 6 months from 1 January 2016.
  In consideration you agree to provide Landlord with your firstborn within 30 days of his/her birth, or in the absence of children prior to 1 December 2020, $1,000,000 no later than 1 January 2021.

  ………………………………….
  Landlord

  ……………………………………
  Tenant
As an aside, as a site extolling the virtues of plain English in agreements, I would have thought you could have put some effort into providing plain English terms of use.

Finally, any stats on the territory breakdown between the 60k documents that have been uploaded? Would be fascinated to see this!

Re: Understand contracts before you sign them

#57

Post by _acme »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #54
dalke wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software license agreements. Huge numbers of successful people click "ok" and don't read the license at all.

Huge numbers? If I ever met anyone who said they read the full license for all software they use, I would call them a liar.

Re-read what you replied to.

Re: Understand contracts before you sign them

#58

Post by uiri »

I feel like this would be great from employment contracts and nondisclosure agreements where the asymmetry of the situation is rather large and, depending on the company, the contract may actually be long enough to warrant a professional analysis. Of course, collecting multiple contracts from the same employer would help with pointing out what is actually unusual/normal (for that particular employer).

Residential leases seems like one of the worst contract markets to start off with. Firstly, because what is legal and illegal to put in a lease varies from place to place. For instance, in Ontario, it is illegal to collect a security deposit (a deposit may be collected but it can only be used towards last month's rent). Secondly, what is normal and what is unusual will also vary, most likely on a much finer grained level (ie: by city/town rather than by state/province). Thirdly, you'll have to deal with leases from less-than-professional landlords (e.g. using a lease drafted according to the rather different laws of a different province/state). Fourthly, the lease will vary a lot depending on the landlord (ie: large property management company vs small property manager vs individual owner-landlord) and the accomodations (ie: house vs condo vs apartment).

Lastly, few residential leases need to be more than about 5 pages long, including all the things the landlord has added over the years after being burned by various bad tenants. If there is a problem, the landlord and tenant will either resolve it or: if the landlord wants the tenant to move out, either it is easy to evict or it is difficult to evict but nothing in the lease will change that that much and if the tenant wants to move out, they will break the lease and good luck to the landlord suing the tenant trying to get the money back (the tenant risks very little by breaking the lease if they are not going to rely on the current landlord as a reference for future landlords). I doubt there is a special clause which can be put into a residential lease which will make it more difficult for the tenant to break it.

Then again, I rarely find legalese which I can't parse (although sometimes it seems written in such a way that it will take me a full five minutes) so perhaps I'm not in the target market for this kind of service.

Re: Understand contracts before you sign them

#59

Post by bdg »

lawgeex wrote: post #41
bdg wrote: post #39

I tried to register and was taken to a broken page.

Hi Apologies for the error message. What browser/OS are you using and have you tried registering again? thanks a lot

Chrome/Manjaro, both at the latest.

I haven't tried registering again, the contract I wanted reviewed expires in a few hours so I picked a different method.

Re: Understand contracts before you sign them

#60

Post by joshuaheard »

As a lawyer, I am always excited to see innovation in the legal space. This seems like an interesting concept: using an algorithm to summarize a document (contract) and to flag unusual clauses. Put the document in, and out comes the legal blessing.

However, I am a little concerned about the viability of this concept in terms of producing a valuable analysis. A true analysis considers the context of a document. For instance, a one-year term is a common residential lease clause. However, what if the tenant was under a 6 month employment contract and needed to change locations? The algorithm would not know this and would not flag the clause. Or what if the tenant was 17 years old and couldn't legally sign contracts in the first place?

Sometimes interpretation of a contract comes down to the exact wording of a contract. Most boilerplate language is the result of years of evolution and precedent. A summary might subtly change or obscure the meaning.

Finally, you are getting very close, if not into, the unauthorized practice of law. I recommend contacting your state bar association for feedback.

That being said, I input my email address into your website and look forward to monitoring your progress.

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