71–80 of 105 posts
The fact I have to upload to a server and my document will not be deleted for up to 24 hours, makes it a no go for most corporate users. Make this a standalone desktop app, with zero cloud dependency and it would be useful. This is very useful for a first pass through a legal doc, for example, to triage documents.
Who is the target audience for something like this? I'm not sure anybody is going to pay to have Apple's ToS simplified before clicking "agree". On the other hand, if you are squinting at a contract that actually matters, I don't think a service like this gives sufficient understanding of what all that legalese would actually mean if shit hits the fan. For example, changing the applicable law in a contract can yield…
I’m a unionized employee who is currently waiting on finalized legal language for a new contract. 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...
Who is the target audience for something like this? I'm not sure anybody is going to pay to have Apple's ToS simplified before clicking "agree". On the other hand, if you are squinting at a contract that actually matters, I don't think a service like this gives sufficient understanding of what all that legalese would actually mean if shit hits the fan. For example, changing the applicable law in a contract can yield…
> 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 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Simply allowing someone to do this could violate the court's order, is the point. Maybe detangle should give a summary on the kind of documents it can help with and how to identify them, if it's going to pretend to be anything like a lawyer.
I'd question if that would hold up in court. Can the court order also be violated if I burn a contract and use the ashes to grow vegetables? Presumably about as much information in the contract is extractable from the vegetable as from a NN weight.
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...
(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?
?
???
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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...
Can this idea be turned on its head to engineer adversarial legal language that sounds reasonable but actually has terrible implications for the signee?
I've heard that in situations like this courts will usually uphold the spirit and not the letter of the contract (same as eg if you have a typo and add a zero somewhere). Not a lawyer and might be 100% wrong on this.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m a unionized employee who is currently waiting on finalized legal language for a new contract. 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.
A 4 page document prompted me for a $50 payment. 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.
I'm sorry, but in the nicest possible way, this is bullshit. 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether you're using the right start point and picking the right optional pieces are definitely important. But for most kinds of agreements I see and advise on, there's nothing lawyers know that nobody else could know. What you need doesn't have to come from a lawyer, though it often does. Meanwhile, specifics of the deal and the broader context can also matter, sometime more than the abstractions legal forms tend to…
Lawyers don't have a monopoloy over business knowledge, they have a monopoly over providing legal services.