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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
Here's the YC SAFE, for example: https://detangle.ai/examples/yc-safe
> [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.
> 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.
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. :)
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.