I think it was in 2024 that I first encountered someone asking AI to revise contract language to reflect the guidelines in A Manual of Style for Contract Drafting. (See this blog post.) Well, I’m hearing that increasingly often. Three examples:
My first example is the screenshot below of a March 2026 exchange of comments on LinkedIn. (Hi Joseph!) It has the advantage of both being funny and reflecting what people are actually looking for.
My second example is a message I received this week from an AI user:
For me the use case is that I have done my own work and I want a Ken-bot to go over it and politely suggest how I f*cked it up.
And my third example is a message I received today:
Mr. Adams – just wanted to say thanks for what you do. You should know that I give whatever AI I’m using some basic operating instructions, and those instructions ALWAYS include some variation of, “only suggest language to me that conforms with the Ken Adams MSCD.”
I’ll say the AI does a decent job of cutting out the wheretoforewiths etc., but it’s a long way off from excellence.
Infusing AI with the essence of MSCD is a viable idea, depending on how you use it. If you apply it to the usual dysfunction of mainstream contract drafting, the system would likely experience severe indigestion. It would be more promising if applied to prose created by someone who has made an attempt to follow MSCD guidelines.
So I’m open to working with a big player in AI to do some sort of mind-uploading to AI. Like Neuromancer, but way less exciting! I reckon that would work better than just expecting off-the-shelf AI to apply MSCD—it will have been fed a mish-mash of my stuff. I suspect that currently it promises, in the usual obsequious AI manner, to apply MSCD, but then it falls short, as the message in my third example suggests.
And more generally, this use case is restrained and targeted. The AI would build off the standard AI-and-contracts use case, namely contract review, but it would be trained just on my stuff, instead of whatever conventional wisdom the user has been steeped in.
Big AI, have your people call my people!
