Technology

Questionable Drafting in a Generative-AI Redline

I’ve written previously about conceptual shortcomings in relying on generative artificial intelligence to mark changes in the other side’s draft, commonly known as “redlining” (see this blog post and this blog post). Now, let’s look at a more basic problem: erratic drafting choices. This post is about one example of that. Recently the contract-lifecycle-management vendor Agiloft released (to quote this … Read More

Perhaps the First and Last Generative-AI Image I Publish

A week ago I created, for the first time, an illustration using generative AI—more specifically, Dall-E. It’s the illustration accompanying this post. Yes, it’s of an unhappy robot. In a spaceship. Sitting on a toilet. It’s puerile, but in my defense, I did it on a whim. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Dall-E is amazing, but I expect that this is the last time … Read More

Could You Use Artificial Intelligence to Check Whether a Contract Complies with “A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting”?

Today someone asked me this in an email message: Are you exploring training AI to incorporate A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting for proofreading contracts? I could see value in a plug-in that incorporates (in track changes) relevant proposed modifications after “learning” the contents of MSCD and applying it to all or part of a contract. This isn’t the … Read More

Using CrossCheck to Police Your Defined Terms and Look for Other Glitches: Q&A with Steven Gullion

These days I don’t write much about legaltech for contracts. There’s way too much of it. And I don’t do deals, so I’m not in much of a position to put such products through their paces. But I’m making an exception with this Q&A with Steven Gullion, of CrossCheck. CrossCheck looks for technical glitches that can afflict use of defined … Read More

Revisiting “Good Enough” in Contract Drafting

An exchange of tweets by Ron Friedmann and Casey Flaherty (here) yesterday prompted much cocktail-party conversation on the state of the legal market, with an emphasis on the implications of the new variant of artificial intelligence known as ChatGPT. (I wrote about ChatGPT in this blog post.) A recurring theme in the discussion was the notion that contracts can be … Read More

Thoughts on AI and “The Last Human Mile”

Recently I noticed this article on Artificial Lawyer. The title is Generative Legal AI + “The Last Human Mile”, and it’s about limits to applying AI to legal work. It says this: The last mile problem is a well-developed theory that many systems fail because there are some key steps at the end that cannot be done properly and that ruins … Read More

ChatGPT Won’t Fix Contracts

If you spend any time on law-related social media, you’ve probably encountered chatter about ChatGPT, an AI chatbot system built on OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), a language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text. (Yes, we’re talking artificial intelligence.) Drafting Contracts People have experimented with ChatGPT by asking it to do all sorts of things. (To … Read More

Offering Contract Content: LegalTech Dips Its Toes in the Water

Apart from looking at a few AI-and-contracts services, I long ago stopped paying much attention to legaltech services relating to contracts. Because I don’t do deals, I don’t need what’s on offer, so I’m not in a good position to evaluate it. And the space is so active that even if I wanted to kick some tires, I wouldn’t know … Read More

The Hole in Corporate Contracting Where Quality Should Be

Last week I noticed Will EY Law Change The Legal Delivery Paradigm?, by Mark Cohen. It’s about EY, the multinational professional services partnership. Here are the first two paragraphs: EY’s leadership recently green lighted a major restructuring, ending months of heated speculation. The plan has two key prongs: (1) EY’s audit and advisory businesses will split; and (2) the advisory business will … Read More

Flipping the Table

On social media, it’s easy enough to find people discussing basic examples of suboptimal contract usages, such as exuberant use of all capitals. Such venting gets plenty of engagement, but generally I don’t join in. I’m reconciled to saying the same thing over and over again. For example, a search for efforts on my blog pulls up over 200 posts. … Read More