[js8]

I wish such a technology could be in hands of ordinary people, so that one wouldn't need an expensive lawyer to spot a contract that is being unfair to him.

[mfoy_]

I'm imagining a tool that you run against a ToS or a EULA or whatever and it spits out bullet point plain-English results.

It would make actually reading the damn things plausible.

[yodon]

I was in an accelerator with a company called beagle.ai that did exactly this (among other things). Their site appears to be down this morning, I don’t know if that is a temporary or permanent state.

[dbcurtis]

cat contract.txt | grep -i "indemnify" | wc

There's your MVP right there.

Seriously, over time I've come to the conclusion that a lot of the most egregious things put in contracts are around open-ended liabilities and indemnifications. It seems like it would be straight-forward to create a tool that simply scanned for which party has liabilities, and what limits there are on those liabilities. It is not everything, but it would be a good first pass.

[dghf]

> cat contract.txt | grep -i "indemnify" | wc

I hate to be that guy, but you have a Useless Use of Cat[0] there.

[0] http://porkmail.org/era/unix/award.html#cat

[dbcurtis]

Sure. grep could take the file. I knew that when I wrote the above line. We could have a nice debate about readability and maintainability, compositional design over compact expression, etc. But that's kind of over-kill for a joke, eh?

[merpnderp]

This will likely make lawyers much cheaper to hire since it will only require maybe an hour of their time, of which 95% will be spent talking to you and the other 5% spent running an AI app on the contract.