[systemtrigger]

It's a problem. No modern man understands all his written obligations.

> Perhaps an opportunity of a startup that would introduce a new way of writing contracts

Yes! Every contract I've ever seen is just an analog program, a decision tree really. Legal concepts are mostly classes. Since you can do things like multiple inheritance with OO you should be able to mimic contract law in a program. But is designing such a service lucrative?

The hardest language in contracts - apart from all the whereupons and nods to the Magna Carta - has to do with contingency planning and minor details. It's all the "if A then B when (C | D)" cover-your-ass reserve. That stuff can get pretty terse and for most people it's a total waste of time to muddle through, so we just sign it and hope it didn't give away our wife as chattel. Of course when we cut out these complexities our contracts might not be as watertight. But I think this should be a judgment call between the participants. What good is a "safe" agreement if no one but a judge can understand it?

You would probably want to focus on a small, profitable subset of contracts. Take web startup investing. There ought to be a way for Startup X to have a form on its site that lets me invest in their company. Maybe that's just too wild of an idea for 2009 but if startups become financially transparent -- I mean really transparent -- micro investing is bound to happen. Government loopholes notwithstanding.