In an exchange of messages today with a contact, they signed off with this:
… and thinking is not popular these days.
That sounds pretty terrible. But it might play out in ways that aren’t too terrible, at least when it comes to contract drafting.
We apply our thinking to what we enjoy. Or what we have to do. So I’ve elected to do no thinking about directions when I drive my car. Sometimes I drive off on some local errand without my car’s Global Positioning System turned on, but I act as if it had been turned on: I drive without thinking where I’m going. Instead, I’m waiting to be told. When I get to an intersection, I wake up from my reverie and reorient myself, shaking my head at my cognitive debt.
What’s cognitive debt? This 2025 MIT study defines cognitive debt as “a condition in which repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking.” And here’s how a commentator expresses it: “Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.” Once you lose a faculty through cognitive debt, it might be a challenge for you to regain it. If you decline to develop it in favor of cognitive debt, you might never acquire it.
I’m OK with the cognitive debt I’ve incurred in relying on my GPS. But what tradeoffs are involved with contract drafting?
Currently, being good at contract drafting—figuring out exactly what to say in a contract and how to say it—requires crazy amounts of thinking. Utterly unrealistic amounts of thinking. So most of us do the only sensible thing: we copy-and-paste. We’ve all been copy-and-pasting since forever, adding cognitive debt to our total each time we do so. (That’s why mainstream contract drafting is dysfunctional.)
Here what’s not going to fix things: encouraging people to do that unrealistic amount of thinking, unless they have a reason for doing so. (Training that helps people become informed consumers of contract language is something different; go here for information about that.) Instead, I’d like contract drafting to be a commodity task. I’ve created prototypes for how I’d do that; check out Adams Contracts.
Nothing meaningful is lost in making contract drafting a commodity task. People who draft contracts just want a contract that expresses a transaction in a way that makes sense for them. They should be able to do that by consulting guidance and answering questions. (See this blog post for why AI on its own wouldn’t be ideal for contract drafting.) They shouldn’t have to do the massive amount of thinking required to create a contract that’s clear, concise, and relevant, any more than we should be required to build our own cars.
But there’s a point after which you’re taking on more cognitive debt than is good for you. For example, I’ve seen indications that some who work with contracts prefer the meager decision tree that comes with copy-and-pasting from a contract used in some other deal. They find it too onerous to work through the possibilities available for a new transaction, even if those possibilities are laid out for them and explained. I find that unsettling.
And looking at the trade-offs for our most fundamental activities, if you decide you’d rather have LLMs do all your writing for you, you’re in effect having LLMs do your thinking for you too. Depending on what you aspire to, that might not be a good thing.
