11 ms·

Legalese – Computational Law

155 points by sdeframond 5y ago

slver 5y ago
I've been thinking about this for literally decades. Unfortunately while the idea is solid, and very much viable, it's all about institutional inertia, not merely technical ability. Good luck to this startup, and I mean it.
grenoire 5y ago
I had a discussion with my boss not long ago, he's a tax lawyer with a few decades under his belt. I asked him simply if he thinks he'll keep his job for more decades to come. His answer was quite enlightening, mainly because of how concrete it was: The problem with tax law (which is not the only set of laws, and not contract law either, but perhaps automatable nevertheless) is that it's simply come to the point that it is at right now as a cumulative effort of centuries of work. It works additively and builds structures so complex that the title tax lawyer almost becomes meaningless with so many specialties being required; VAT, corporate and personal income taxes, inheritance and property... Any effort to algorithmically digitise the existing law would fail unless it's able to perfectly replicate it in code. All of the loopholes and exceptions, safeguards and declarations, there's immense inertia ahead. What he on the other hand thinks has been revolutionary is free access to law, advanced text search tools, and software to make filings and communication significantly easier. That's the boring part that speeds your work up so you can spend more time devising plans to get your clients to pay less in taxes, and construct stronger defences. There are many low-hanging fruits in this process; I wish these guys the best of luck, but it seems to me that the comparisons drawn (Intuit, Adobe, etc.) are not analogues. Lawyers aren't seeking these tools for it doesn't provide them value, it only takes away billable hours away.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  It seems like there could be a lot of value in disentangling the web: repealing the original laws and replacing them with a single law that covers everything in one place. Legal refactoring if you like. I can only imagine that would be a humungous task. And presumably the existence of case law makes it much harder still. It would be quite interesting to think about what the legal equivalent of unit tests would look like. Presumably a large collections of sets of circumstances and desired legal outcomes. It seems to me that this might be an interesting output of legislatures in addition to statutes (although whether they would/should be controlled by the legisalture or judiciary is also quite an interesting question, as our existing system seems to rely quite heavily on the judiciary being able reinterpret laws in ways the original legislators most likely didn't intend)
  - cbsmith 5y ago
    The idea that simpler laws won't get exploited is... Well, I get it, because that's how one operates in computer security, but the way the law works is necessarily quite different. It's not designed so much to make doing what is illegal impossible as it is to make it possible to prosecute those doing things that we'd like to discourage.
  - jacques_chester 5y ago
    > repealing the original laws and replacing them with a single law that covers everything in one place. Legal refactoring if you like. I can only imagine that would be a humungous task. And presumably the existence of case law makes it much harder still. These are called Reform Acts. They are indeed humungous tasks, rarely undertaken. Where I studied law, in the Northern Territory, a Law of Property Act was passed in 2000 and repealed Acts and overruled case law going back to the 12th century in Britain. It was indeed a massive effort. For some areas of law the Act is also a Code (the Act explicitly says that it is the sole, whole body of the relevant law). This is mostly done for criminal law. Codes are rare in common law jurisdictions like the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand etc. Codes are much more common in civil law countries like France, where the ideal is for all of law to be centralised and rationalised. Both systems require endless tinkering, debate and reinterpretation, which is why I am skeptical of universalist missions to convert the whole of the law into a system of formal symbols.
    - ska 5y ago
      Confusingly Canada has a mix of both civil and common law, at least in Quebec.
      - a3camero 5y ago
        There are other codes in Canada too, even outside of Quebec, like the Criminal Code of Canada.
        ska 5y ago
        Right, but that in itself doesn't make it a civil system. If I recall correctly Quebec separates by private and "public" law, so if you get divorced or break up a company it's one system, if you steal from someone, the other. Somehow it's all hybridized and works.
- munk-a 5y ago
  > Lawyers aren't seeking these tools for it doesn't provide them value, it only takes away billable hours away. All billable hours aren't created equally. If I can automate the work that I currently hire fresh grads to do - the work of actually drafting up contract agreements for review and wills - but price my services just under the prices offered by other firms then I can make a killing. You can purchase a hand carved wooden table for your living room and some people still actively manufacture these "bespoke" items, however most folks shop at IKEA and chose between one of a dozen styles available for a dining room table. These two products are mostly functionally identical in terms of supporting food and weathering the years (if you go by depreciation the IKEA table probably loses value slower than a hand carved table - and you can replace it pretty much at will). There will likely always be contract lawyers around to sort out large M&A agreements and other high priced transactions, but wills and simple employment contracts - delivering these in a correct format (i.e. not just a download a sample contract and fill in names possibly resulting in something unenforceable) will be a game changer. Taxes are extremely complicated - but they got that way by design. The US Tax code is the result of one of the most insane applications of regulatory capture in the world and it's there to allow Intuit to continue printing money at the expense of the tax payer - simplifying those (like for real - not the 2017 version) might not end up happening for decades as there is a ton of money entrenched - so that seems like an incredibly poor part of the market to initially target. Contract law though, it's not simple but it's so utterly clear and actually codifying it would likely greatly aide law makers in discovering and resolving any existing loopholes and might even provide some useful insight into how the US could better handle the question of employee vs. contractor by enumerating rights and privileges in a clearer format. And wills, pretty much everyone seeks independent legal council to write one of these at some point - it is highly advisable depending on where you live (in Canada a lack of a clear will causes assets to be tied up by the government for an extended period of time) so you could make a lot of money edging the market out there in particular.
  - ska 5y ago
    > If I can automate the work that I currently hire fresh grads to do - the work of actually drafting up contract agreements for review and wills - but price my services just under the prices offered by other firms then I can make a killing. This is probably true, but has a definite knock on effect that breaks the existing training model pretty badly. I suspect the longer term stable solution is relatively fewer working lawyers relying more on tools - but transitioning the industry to that model will be painful.
- mengwong 5y ago
  Sure, but the intended user for a lot of this stuff isn't the lawyer – it's the end-user who's glad to have an alternative to the lawyer! Like, owning a bicycle means I don't need to call a taxi for some trips. Not all trips, just the local ones, but that's a lot of my trips. Free access to law, and software for filings like afterpattern.com, that's the boring stuff that lawyers don't want to do and I don't want to pay for, so win/win. And that's all part of the larger vision of computational law that Legalese wants to help realize. Thanks for the good wishes and I hope to deliver on the vision, we've been at it for five years and will probably be at it for another ten before we start seeing results percolating into the real world.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
Isn't this the problem "smart contracts" were supposed to solve? I say "supposed to," because the problem here is that if contracts are code, and code can have bugs, then contracts can have bugs. Technically, this is true of traditional contracts, but, if a traditional contract has a bug, it gets settled through the court system, not just executed as is.
- Zhyl 5y ago
  It's worth noting that 'Smart Contracts' are more 'Financial Instruments as code' rather than 'Ricardian Contracts' which are what most people think when they see 'smart' and 'contract' together. I had a comment on the last time this came up where 'A computer language for law' was a bad idea unqualified, but this page actually seems to address most of the points I raised in that comment. The thrust of the comment is 'Law is not something that will be executable and that we just automate' but more 'Law is something with an underlying structure that we can use engineering tools to write, validate and understand.' That is to say, the tools are there to help the humans with doing law stuff, not doing it for them. This page is pretty wooly and high level, but it does seem to be going more down that avenue, which is laudable. It does mention smart contracts and Ethereum which I think might be distracting in the early days, but we'll see.
pierre 5y ago
If you are intrigued by the idea that law can and will be represented as computer code / data, here are a few link to go deeper : * British national act as a logic program (1982): the paper that is the based of most current effort in this domain https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234805335_The_Briti https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234805335_The_Briti... * Standford codex LSP initiative that try to standarize the format in which legal rule will be encoded https://law.stanford.edu/publications/developing-a-legal-spe https://law.stanford.edu/publications/developing-a-legal-spe... (as far as I know the initiative is still going, don't hesitate to contact oliver goodenough if you want to get involved) * OECD recently published a full repport on current initiative in the domain https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/governance/cracking-the-code_3 https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/governance/cracking-the-code_3... * There was a workshop at last ICAIL where a lot of people showed their progress on the topic (link to all demo video in this gdoc : https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1-7cJ0KsYzQ8IOY3L_bYX https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1-7cJ0KsYzQ8IOY3L_bYX...) * MIT started a journal on the topic ~1 year ago https://law.mit.edu/ https://law.mit.edu/ If you want to work on this topic DM me :)
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  > and will be strong doubt. laws are by definition supposed to be „soft” and not hardcoded. see the smart contract hacks. this simply doesn’t happen in law, because the spirit plays a large role, and the spirit is something that cannot be coded
  - bsedlm 5y ago
    I firmly believe that it will be. However it won't be anytime soon because this entails a transition similar to going from rule by king to rule by laws. The law is (nowdays) is backed by writing, and since I think that computing is a next step in the evolution of writing (along with printing press) one day---likely in dozens of generations (hundreds of years)---the law will be backed by computing. All these technologies change the nature of a human's consiouness; it will take hundreds of years. Look at Walter Ong's work for better made arguments along these lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong
zitterbewegung 5y ago
Sort of weird to have their whole one pager as an image considering that there is no alt text so its not really accessible if you are blind.
- mengwong 5y ago
  Sorry about that! I'm adding a link to the PDF version which I think is tagged for accessibility. So you should be able to click on the image and go to the PDF. Give me a while, though, am fighting with Jekyll.
deleted 5y ago
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nemo1618 5y ago
I would love to see this succeed, if only so that their static analyzer can go around detecting vulnerabilities ("loopholes") in all sorts of common laws. Legal 0-days!
deleted 5y ago
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sharps_xp 5y ago
I think you should rethink the name. Here's the definition: the formal and technical language of legal documents that is often hard to understand. "the typed pages were full of confusing legalese" Business people actually think it's an asset to have an attorney that is "good" with legalese, but the practice actually represents dishonesty. And attorneys are expected to catch these unclear legal language, but most won't complain b/c it requires a few extra hours of back and forth for which they can charge money for. If software is going to eat law, I hope one of the consequences of that is better allocation of legal services and more transparency in legal contracts
- txbuck 5y ago
  'Illegalese' has a nice ring to it.
cheph 5y ago
The site is horrible. Like really really bad. Hard to read, ugly, confusing. I mean I don't want to be negative, I want to give good feedback, but I can't even copy what i want to respond to.
abraxaz 5y ago
There has been a lot of work using OWL and RDF to represent laws and contracts and to use it for compliance checking. For more information see: - https://finregont.com/ https://finregont.com/ : Semantic compliance in finance - https://bankontology.com/ https://bankontology.com/ : Semantic bank compliance - https://www.smartlogic.com/home https://www.smartlogic.com/home : I think this company uses semantic technologies and AI to do legal compliance checking - https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02062174/document https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02062174/document : Automation of legal reasoning and decision based on ontologies (PhD thesis on the topic) - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=semantic+legal+compliance&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sema... : search google scholar for semantic legal compliance I know there are more companies doing it, just don't know their names right now. The benefits of this is: - Don't need yet another DSL, RDF works fine, and it's already being widely used. - A lot of the world is already modelled in OWL (e.g. Organizational Ontology, Provenance Ontology, literally too many to list) - Already have a good query language with inference support (SPARQL)
- abraxaz 5y ago
  Check this out also: - https://data.finlex.fi/en/main https://data.finlex.fi/en/main - Semantic Finlex – Finnish Law and Justice as Linked Open Data - https://lynx-project.eu/project https://lynx-project.eu/project - Legal Knowledge Graph for Multilingual Compliance Services - https://www.mirelproject.eu/ https://www.mirelproject.eu/ - MINING AND REASONING WITH LEGAL TEXTS.
- syats 5y ago
  Ideed, there is https://www.w3.org/TR/odrl-model/ https://www.w3.org/TR/odrl-model/ no need to develop your own Domain Specific Language ;)
  - abraxaz 5y ago
    You should submit this as a new link to HN, if you won't I will :) Need more semantic tech related stuff on here IMO, most people working in tech don't even know it exists AFAICT.
davidm888 5y ago
I am both a transactional (contracts) attorney and a software developer. I've observered a number of fundamental parallels between contract drafting and coding. I can see how for certain "boilerplate" documents, computer-generated document assembly could produce decent results. But I honestly don't think that (human) lawyers can be eliminated, for several important reasons. First, consider how laws come about in the first place. It's an often messy political process with a lot of disagreement and compromises. What ends up passing might have deliberate ambiguities that purposely don't create certainty in a number of fringe cases. Second, most laws are either "over-inclusive" or "under-inclusive," meaning that the text can't possibly enumerate every situation, so there has to be interpretation around the edges. Third, some aspects of law involve subjective (not objective) standards and rely on such things as "intent," "reasonableness," "community standards," and "equity." These involve very human judgment on the part of a judge or jury and vary according to time, place, culture, ethics, community, etc. Although some cases can be resolved with mathematical efficiency, the legal process is usually inextricably intertwined with humanity and all of its subjective flaws, and as long as it's human beings writing the laws and humans applying interpretations and judgments, it will be a messy, emotional, occassionally illogical process.
- Rochus 5y ago
  That gets to the heart of the matter. I have studied computer engineering and law as well. Statements like "Verilog allows programmers to draft circuits, Legalese's L4 will allow programmers to express law" demonstrate naivety to the real challenge. The authors should take a closer look at the disillusionment that has arisen after fifty years of rule-based knowledge representation and inference.
  - tgbugs 5y ago
    Consider also the disillusionment that a significant portion of the population feels when confronted with the nearly 1000 years of rule based knowledge representation that is common law. Maybe a good law would be that if you can't be arsed to write the law in a formal language, or can't figure out how, then it shouldn't be a law in the first place :)
unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
One thing I really like about the Legalese front page is they identify the problem with all the other numerous contracting-automation startups out there. We don't need another soup-to-nuts automated contracting solution. We have those, they're fine but they're not going to bring about world peace. What we really need is an industry-wide API-like-thing to provide a higher base to build all the other contracting solutions on top of. Right now the default API is "English language" and law of your choice. That's too hard of a problem to solve transparently with technology and it presents a learning curve that's hard to justify with an endgame of vendor lock-in and product instability. And you can only do so much if you're the only contracting party "speaking" that API. Designing a replacement API isn't easy either, and industry adoption may be nigh impossible from the position of a startup. But these folks seem clever and they think big so something to watch.
- deleted 5y ago
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ricksunny 5y ago
We used Legalese.com for a Singapore SAFE agreement. Loved it.
danielrhodes 5y ago
There's a well known book on law called "An Introduction to Legal Reasoning". And in this book, it more or less calls out this scenario on the first page. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5687&context=journal_articles https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... "The pretense is that the law is a system of known rules applied by a judge; the pretense has long been under attack. In an important sense legal rules are never clear, and, if a rule had to be clear before it could be imposed, society would be impossible. The mechanism accepts the differences of view and ambiguities of words. It provides for the participation of the community in resolving the ambiguity by providing a forum for the discussion of policy in the gap of ambiguity. On serious controversial questions, it makes it possible to take the first step in the direction of what otherwise would be forbidden ends. The mechanism is indispensable to peace in a community." I've thought a lot about this because it directly impacts whether you could turn a contract into code. Code is for the most part very deterministic - you can expect that the logic you use will be interpreted in the same way every time given the same inputs. When that isn't the case, it's generally considered a bug. Law and contracts appear to be deterministic, but are in fact not. Anything that is written into a law or contract is subject to interpretation later. There's no attempt at making it exhaustive because it's not possible, nor is it necessarily desirable. Sometimes contracts contain language that becomes invalid later on, and you don't want to define things too tightly or you'll have to modify the contract non-stop. Sometimes things arise which are not spelled out in the contract and as long as the parties agree, there's no problem. The rules around contracts are a lot more bendable than in code, and "it depends" is quite often the answer to many questions. So is there overlap between code and contracts/law? Certainly. But the deeper you go, the more exceptions that arise.
- davidm888 5y ago
  I agree completely, and the quote you cited more eloquently describes what I was trying to convey in some of my earlier comments. Coming from a software-development mindset, I started practicing law twenty years ago, and the hardest adjustment to make was to understand that even though the law seemed analogous to deterministic code on the surface, in reality it is much different. Today, both writing code and practicing law, I still have to remind myself of the difference sometimes. It is a completely different mindset when dealing with ambiguity, especially in the cases where ambiguity is sometimes desired, welcomed, or necessary. It is also eye-opening to realize that the parties never consider all of the future possibilities, and as such, it's not even possible for a document, however syntactically correct, to convey the intent of the parties 100% -- they don't even know their full intent as to infinite possibilities. I think many of the commenters, just like I did before, struggle to understand this. They don't realize that the "flaw" they're trying to correct is actually a feature -- a messy, sometimes annoying, irrational, subjective, human, necessary feature that's actually an important part of the functioning of society. It's intoxicating to think of a purely logical society driven by immutable, consistent, and brutally efficient laws for everyone, but upon further thought, it's a bit terrifying. Thankfully, it's also impossible.
tgbugs 5y ago
The problem here isn't that we are missing a language for expressing laws. Indeed, DSLs for expressing legal axioms don't really exist, and I expect that formal verifiable languages will be created, but even when they are, the problem is not an inability to express laws, the problem is how to map them to entities in the real world. To give only a single example, "what is admissible evidence?" Assume for a moment that we have solved the "what is admissible evidence in this context" problem. Now you have a giant list of pieces of evidence, testimony, etc. How do you prove chain of custody? The legal system is utterly blind to the world, its agents are intentionally blinded to much of the information, and practically blinded to others. Even with modern surveillance the amount of uncertainty that is present in many legal cases is substantial, and machine learning won't help you here, because every legal case is a one off. I'm sure someone will try to create a statistical guilt detection net despite the obviousness that it will inevitably produce unjust results. If you want laws to be written in formal languages, you need a system for defining formal semantics for the entities and relations that their abstracted axioms describe, and things like OWL and RDF are not sufficient, because they only provides the hypotheses, not the evidence. You can assert that evidence subClassOf admissible-evidence, but you need proof that the assertion is valid that can be checked by multiple parties (or anyone with the desire to do so). The one-off nature of many cases often means that you can't go out and test the hypothesis again. These are hard measurement problems, and we don't have a good language for describing them, and how the measurements themselves are governed by the legals system. That said, being able to bootstrap simulate court cases with juries drawn from the population would already be a massive win for interrogating laws and their implementation and enforcement. Similarly being able to simulate new legislation to reveal loopholes would be fantastic, though I doubt politicians would enjoy that. There is quite a bit of data, but I don't think it is particularly amenable to the current fads in machine learning. Amusingly people complain that we'll never be able to write down all the axioms, yet someone wrote down all the laws. Economically unattractive due to a tragedy of the commons certainly, but at the end of the day someone is going to have to write down all the axioms, one way or another. Maybe modern machine learning techniques could be used to generate the axioms for humans to review?
- abraxaz 5y ago
  Given that OWL and RDF is meant for both open world data and data models, and is amenable to partial specification, it really solves the problem of relating legal rules to the rest of the world quite well. In your legal ontology you just specify evidence, and admissible evidence, and then another ontology can pick up from there and model it in a specific domain. And OWL has formal and provable entailment rules. So everyone can agree, given samme ontologies what the implications are. There are unsolved problems there but most of the things you list are already thought through.
penguin_linux 5y ago
I'm finding it really difficult to understand what this software actually does. The name interests me... but wow this site is difficult read
ibejoeb 5y ago
Contract fuzzing will give rise to the worst, most litigious trolls ever...
mengwong 5y ago
One of the most salutary responses to the ambition of bringing "digital transformation" to the legal industry comes from PaulG himself: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1384422654195683328 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1384422654195683328 > In 2008 I spent a month writing a web-based system for managing all YC's funding documents. With one click you could get an instance of the latest docs, prepopulated with all the startup's info from our database. The lawyers quietly ignored it and kept using Microsoft Word. Others have said in the comments that doctors and lawyers are "the last, most powerful guilds" remaining. On the one hand, it's easy to call for "the end of lawyers". (The Legalese website says that sort of thing as a provocation, a way of staking a flag in the sand.) On the other, it's likely that society will always define a special role for the white-collar warrior, the champion of the courtroom; for high-stakes, once-in-a-lifetime situations, you want expert human hand-holding. In books like https://www.amazon.com/Future-Professions-Technology-Transform-Experts-ebook/dp/B010N9QJ5M https://www.amazon.com/Future-Professions-Technology-Transfo... Richard Susskind offers a more nuanced middle ground. Look at medicine: together, the Apple Watch, WebMD, DirectLabs, home glucose monitors, and home blood pressure monitors (let us never miss an opportunity to say "sphygmomanometer") allow millions of people to do for themselves what they used to need a doctor for. In turn, that lets doctors focus on more high-value work. Suppose we distinguish quantitative and qualitative reasoning: numbers belong to the former; legal and logical problem-solving to the latter. Quantitative reasoning went in-house when spreadsheets (the original killer app) landed on the PC: now millions of people do for themselves what a couple of generations ago used to be the domain of the accountant, the bookkeeper, the finance specialist. What would "spreadsheets for law" look like? If tools emerge that allow laypeople at home and in business to explore for themselves simple questions like "what is the deadline for me to do X", "what things am I required to prepare ahead of that deadline", and "how do I get out of doing Y", frankly the lawyers might breathe a sigh of relief so they don't have to keep annoying people by answering "it depends". There's plenty of low-hanging fruit out there like that which makes people's lives better. Software like docassemble.org and startups like afterpattern.com are exploring these possibilities. Farther into the science-fiction future, researchers in France did a lovely demo, basically fuzzing the tax code to find a sploit that deserved to be patched. https://blog.merigoux.fr/en/2019/12/20/taxes-formal-proofs.html https://blog.merigoux.fr/en/2019/12/20/taxes-formal-proofs.h... One final point: people who argue for the necessity of discretion and the desirability of vagueness and ambiguity tend to have, in the past, benefited from such discretion. But there are less privileged people out there who have been on the sharp receiving end of discretion, and they might prefer a little less discretion and a little more algorithmic, explainable, deterministic fairness!
roel_v 5y ago
This reads like it's something new, and maybe parts of it are, and probably any implementation will be 'new' in the sense that it uses recent technical innovations; but when I was in law school 10 years ago, I had a professor (with a chair in 'computational law' or something like that) who had been doing such things since the 1980's. Being a software developer in law school, I looked into his field quite a bit (there have been entire conferences on this topic since the 1980's) and there have been a lot of 'research projects' that explored various parts of what it seems this project is proposing; but none of them practical or big enough to make any impact. And, as usual in academia, it then dies off when the funding ends and the next cycle begins. Anyway, I'm interested to see what will come out of this, but I see very little awareness of past work, which might be because they want to make it look more revolutionary than it is; or because they're reinventing the wheel. Time will tell.
cblconfederate 5y ago
It looks like a new legal system would be more useful. Law is intentionally vague for all sorts of reasons both good and nefarious. Computational law is automated contracts. OTOH if they succeed at coding a large % of finance law, they 'll have created an excellent machine to find loopholes to exploit.
syats 5y ago
One very basic prerequisite for the approach (vaguely) outlined in the link, is to have machine-readable contracts/law/etc. We can debate hours what machine-readable means, but definitely text in varying fonts and layouts IN AN IMAGE does not point in that direction.
Alkim 5y ago
An important aspect of this is that it is located in Singapore. Singapore is a heavily regulated sandbox in many, many areas. And it is small. For example, there is only a single companies registry and only a single tax authority. And Singapore has a history of mandating big changes. And a lot of effort sunk into presenting itself as cutting edge in terms of government services and management of its population. I'd suggest that it may be possible for Legalese to try some things in Singapore, perhaps in concert with one of the government authorities, that could be an interesting demonstrator. (Disclosure: One of the founders is a good friend, and I am wishing them success.)
TheMagicHorsey 5y ago
The project seems to miss the fact that when you build an English to DSL compiler, if there are problems with the compiler, the English will prevail under our court system ... not the compiled DSL. As a result, the computational legal infrastructure will slowly diverge from what the actual legal outcome would be. That's problematic.
billytetrud 5y ago
I came across legalese a few years back. Looks like they've come a long way!

155 points by sdeframond 5y ago

I've been thinking about this for literally decades. Unfortunately while the idea is solid, and very much viable, it's all about institutional inertia, not merely technical ability. Good luck to this startup, and I mean it.

grenoire 5y ago

I had a discussion with my boss not long ago, he's a tax lawyer with a few decades under his belt. I asked him simply if he thinks he'll keep his job for more decades to come. His answer was quite enlightening, mainly because of how concrete it was: The problem with tax law (which is not the only set of laws, and not contract law either, but perhaps automatable nevertheless) is that it's simply come to the point that it is at right now as a cumulative effort of centuries of work. It works additively and builds structures so complex that the title tax lawyer almost becomes meaningless with so many specialties being required; VAT, corporate and personal income taxes, inheritance and property... Any effort to algorithmically digitise the existing law would fail unless it's able to perfectly replicate it in code. All of the loopholes and exceptions, safeguards and declarations, there's immense inertia ahead. What he on the other hand thinks has been revolutionary is free access to law, advanced text search tools, and software to make filings and communication significantly easier. That's the boring part that speeds your work up so you can spend more time devising plans to get your clients to pay less in taxes, and construct stronger defences. There are many low-hanging fruits in this process; I wish these guys the best of luck, but it seems to me that the comparisons drawn (Intuit, Adobe, etc.) are not analogues. Lawyers aren't seeking these tools for it doesn't provide them value, it only takes away billable hours away.

nicoburns 5y ago
It seems like there could be a lot of value in disentangling the web: repealing the original laws and replacing them with a single law that covers everything in one place. Legal refactoring if you like. I can only imagine that would be a humungous task. And presumably the existence of case law makes it much harder still. It would be quite interesting to think about what the legal equivalent of unit tests would look like. Presumably a large collections of sets of circumstances and desired legal outcomes. It seems to me that this might be an interesting output of legislatures in addition to statutes (although whether they would/should be controlled by the legisalture or judiciary is also quite an interesting question, as our existing system seems to rely quite heavily on the judiciary being able reinterpret laws in ways the original legislators most likely didn't intend)
- cbsmith 5y ago
  The idea that simpler laws won't get exploited is... Well, I get it, because that's how one operates in computer security, but the way the law works is necessarily quite different. It's not designed so much to make doing what is illegal impossible as it is to make it possible to prosecute those doing things that we'd like to discourage.
- jacques_chester 5y ago
  > repealing the original laws and replacing them with a single law that covers everything in one place. Legal refactoring if you like. I can only imagine that would be a humungous task. And presumably the existence of case law makes it much harder still. These are called Reform Acts. They are indeed humungous tasks, rarely undertaken. Where I studied law, in the Northern Territory, a Law of Property Act was passed in 2000 and repealed Acts and overruled case law going back to the 12th century in Britain. It was indeed a massive effort. For some areas of law the Act is also a Code (the Act explicitly says that it is the sole, whole body of the relevant law). This is mostly done for criminal law. Codes are rare in common law jurisdictions like the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand etc. Codes are much more common in civil law countries like France, where the ideal is for all of law to be centralised and rationalised. Both systems require endless tinkering, debate and reinterpretation, which is why I am skeptical of universalist missions to convert the whole of the law into a system of formal symbols.
  - ska 5y ago
    Confusingly Canada has a mix of both civil and common law, at least in Quebec.
    - a3camero 5y ago
      There are other codes in Canada too, even outside of Quebec, like the Criminal Code of Canada.
      - ska 5y ago
        Right, but that in itself doesn't make it a civil system. If I recall correctly Quebec separates by private and "public" law, so if you get divorced or break up a company it's one system, if you steal from someone, the other. Somehow it's all hybridized and works.
munk-a 5y ago
> Lawyers aren't seeking these tools for it doesn't provide them value, it only takes away billable hours away. All billable hours aren't created equally. If I can automate the work that I currently hire fresh grads to do - the work of actually drafting up contract agreements for review and wills - but price my services just under the prices offered by other firms then I can make a killing. You can purchase a hand carved wooden table for your living room and some people still actively manufacture these "bespoke" items, however most folks shop at IKEA and chose between one of a dozen styles available for a dining room table. These two products are mostly functionally identical in terms of supporting food and weathering the years (if you go by depreciation the IKEA table probably loses value slower than a hand carved table - and you can replace it pretty much at will). There will likely always be contract lawyers around to sort out large M&A agreements and other high priced transactions, but wills and simple employment contracts - delivering these in a correct format (i.e. not just a download a sample contract and fill in names possibly resulting in something unenforceable) will be a game changer. Taxes are extremely complicated - but they got that way by design. The US Tax code is the result of one of the most insane applications of regulatory capture in the world and it's there to allow Intuit to continue printing money at the expense of the tax payer - simplifying those (like for real - not the 2017 version) might not end up happening for decades as there is a ton of money entrenched - so that seems like an incredibly poor part of the market to initially target. Contract law though, it's not simple but it's so utterly clear and actually codifying it would likely greatly aide law makers in discovering and resolving any existing loopholes and might even provide some useful insight into how the US could better handle the question of employee vs. contractor by enumerating rights and privileges in a clearer format. And wills, pretty much everyone seeks independent legal council to write one of these at some point - it is highly advisable depending on where you live (in Canada a lack of a clear will causes assets to be tied up by the government for an extended period of time) so you could make a lot of money edging the market out there in particular.
- ska 5y ago
  > If I can automate the work that I currently hire fresh grads to do - the work of actually drafting up contract agreements for review and wills - but price my services just under the prices offered by other firms then I can make a killing. This is probably true, but has a definite knock on effect that breaks the existing training model pretty badly. I suspect the longer term stable solution is relatively fewer working lawyers relying more on tools - but transitioning the industry to that model will be painful.
mengwong 5y ago
Sure, but the intended user for a lot of this stuff isn't the lawyer – it's the end-user who's glad to have an alternative to the lawyer! Like, owning a bicycle means I don't need to call a taxi for some trips. Not all trips, just the local ones, but that's a lot of my trips. Free access to law, and software for filings like afterpattern.com, that's the boring stuff that lawyers don't want to do and I don't want to pay for, so win/win. And that's all part of the larger vision of computational law that Legalese wants to help realize. Thanks for the good wishes and I hope to deliver on the vision, we've been at it for five years and will probably be at it for another ten before we start seeing results percolating into the real world.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

Isn't this the problem "smart contracts" were supposed to solve? I say "supposed to," because the problem here is that if contracts are code, and code can have bugs, then contracts can have bugs. Technically, this is true of traditional contracts, but, if a traditional contract has a bug, it gets settled through the court system, not just executed as is.

Zhyl 5y ago
It's worth noting that 'Smart Contracts' are more 'Financial Instruments as code' rather than 'Ricardian Contracts' which are what most people think when they see 'smart' and 'contract' together. I had a comment on the last time this came up where 'A computer language for law' was a bad idea unqualified, but this page actually seems to address most of the points I raised in that comment. The thrust of the comment is 'Law is not something that will be executable and that we just automate' but more 'Law is something with an underlying structure that we can use engineering tools to write, validate and understand.' That is to say, the tools are there to help the humans with doing law stuff, not doing it for them. This page is pretty wooly and high level, but it does seem to be going more down that avenue, which is laudable. It does mention smart contracts and Ethereum which I think might be distracting in the early days, but we'll see.

pierre 5y ago

If you are intrigued by the idea that law can and will be represented as computer code / data, here are a few link to go deeper : * British national act as a logic program (1982): the paper that is the based of most current effort in this domain https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234805335_The_Briti https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234805335_The_Briti... * Standford codex LSP initiative that try to standarize the format in which legal rule will be encoded https://law.stanford.edu/publications/developing-a-legal-spe https://law.stanford.edu/publications/developing-a-legal-spe... (as far as I know the initiative is still going, don't hesitate to contact oliver goodenough if you want to get involved) * OECD recently published a full repport on current initiative in the domain https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/governance/cracking-the-code_3 https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/governance/cracking-the-code_3... * There was a workshop at last ICAIL where a lot of people showed their progress on the topic (link to all demo video in this gdoc : https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1-7cJ0KsYzQ8IOY3L_bYX https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1-7cJ0KsYzQ8IOY3L_bYX...) * MIT started a journal on the topic ~1 year ago https://law.mit.edu/ https://law.mit.edu/ If you want to work on this topic DM me :)

axiosgunnar 5y ago
> and will be strong doubt. laws are by definition supposed to be „soft” and not hardcoded. see the smart contract hacks. this simply doesn’t happen in law, because the spirit plays a large role, and the spirit is something that cannot be coded
- bsedlm 5y ago
  I firmly believe that it will be. However it won't be anytime soon because this entails a transition similar to going from rule by king to rule by laws. The law is (nowdays) is backed by writing, and since I think that computing is a next step in the evolution of writing (along with printing press) one day---likely in dozens of generations (hundreds of years)---the law will be backed by computing. All these technologies change the nature of a human's consiouness; it will take hundreds of years. Look at Walter Ong's work for better made arguments along these lines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_J._Ong

zitterbewegung 5y ago

Sort of weird to have their whole one pager as an image considering that there is no alt text so its not really accessible if you are blind.

mengwong 5y ago
Sorry about that! I'm adding a link to the PDF version which I think is tagged for accessibility. So you should be able to click on the image and go to the PDF. Give me a while, though, am fighting with Jekyll.

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nemo1618 5y ago

I would love to see this succeed, if only so that their static analyzer can go around detecting vulnerabilities ("loopholes") in all sorts of common laws. Legal 0-days!

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sharps_xp 5y ago

I think you should rethink the name. Here's the definition: the formal and technical language of legal documents that is often hard to understand. "the typed pages were full of confusing legalese" Business people actually think it's an asset to have an attorney that is "good" with legalese, but the practice actually represents dishonesty. And attorneys are expected to catch these unclear legal language, but most won't complain b/c it requires a few extra hours of back and forth for which they can charge money for. If software is going to eat law, I hope one of the consequences of that is better allocation of legal services and more transparency in legal contracts

txbuck 5y ago
'Illegalese' has a nice ring to it.

cheph 5y ago

The site is horrible. Like really really bad. Hard to read, ugly, confusing. I mean I don't want to be negative, I want to give good feedback, but I can't even copy what i want to respond to.

abraxaz 5y ago

There has been a lot of work using OWL and RDF to represent laws and contracts and to use it for compliance checking. For more information see: - https://finregont.com/ https://finregont.com/ : Semantic compliance in finance - https://bankontology.com/ https://bankontology.com/ : Semantic bank compliance - https://www.smartlogic.com/home https://www.smartlogic.com/home : I think this company uses semantic technologies and AI to do legal compliance checking - https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02062174/document https://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-02062174/document : Automation of legal reasoning and decision based on ontologies (PhD thesis on the topic) - https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=semantic+legal+compliance&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sema... : search google scholar for semantic legal compliance I know there are more companies doing it, just don't know their names right now. The benefits of this is: - Don't need yet another DSL, RDF works fine, and it's already being widely used. - A lot of the world is already modelled in OWL (e.g. Organizational Ontology, Provenance Ontology, literally too many to list) - Already have a good query language with inference support (SPARQL)

abraxaz 5y ago
Check this out also: - https://data.finlex.fi/en/main https://data.finlex.fi/en/main - Semantic Finlex – Finnish Law and Justice as Linked Open Data - https://lynx-project.eu/project https://lynx-project.eu/project - Legal Knowledge Graph for Multilingual Compliance Services - https://www.mirelproject.eu/ https://www.mirelproject.eu/ - MINING AND REASONING WITH LEGAL TEXTS.
syats 5y ago
Ideed, there is https://www.w3.org/TR/odrl-model/ https://www.w3.org/TR/odrl-model/ no need to develop your own Domain Specific Language ;)
- abraxaz 5y ago
  You should submit this as a new link to HN, if you won't I will :) Need more semantic tech related stuff on here IMO, most people working in tech don't even know it exists AFAICT.

davidm888 5y ago

I am both a transactional (contracts) attorney and a software developer. I've observered a number of fundamental parallels between contract drafting and coding. I can see how for certain "boilerplate" documents, computer-generated document assembly could produce decent results. But I honestly don't think that (human) lawyers can be eliminated, for several important reasons. First, consider how laws come about in the first place. It's an often messy political process with a lot of disagreement and compromises. What ends up passing might have deliberate ambiguities that purposely don't create certainty in a number of fringe cases. Second, most laws are either "over-inclusive" or "under-inclusive," meaning that the text can't possibly enumerate every situation, so there has to be interpretation around the edges. Third, some aspects of law involve subjective (not objective) standards and rely on such things as "intent," "reasonableness," "community standards," and "equity." These involve very human judgment on the part of a judge or jury and vary according to time, place, culture, ethics, community, etc. Although some cases can be resolved with mathematical efficiency, the legal process is usually inextricably intertwined with humanity and all of its subjective flaws, and as long as it's human beings writing the laws and humans applying interpretations and judgments, it will be a messy, emotional, occassionally illogical process.

Rochus 5y ago
That gets to the heart of the matter. I have studied computer engineering and law as well. Statements like "Verilog allows programmers to draft circuits, Legalese's L4 will allow programmers to express law" demonstrate naivety to the real challenge. The authors should take a closer look at the disillusionment that has arisen after fifty years of rule-based knowledge representation and inference.
- tgbugs 5y ago
  Consider also the disillusionment that a significant portion of the population feels when confronted with the nearly 1000 years of rule based knowledge representation that is common law. Maybe a good law would be that if you can't be arsed to write the law in a formal language, or can't figure out how, then it shouldn't be a law in the first place :)

unyttigfjelltol 5y ago

One thing I really like about the Legalese front page is they identify the problem with all the other numerous contracting-automation startups out there. We don't need another soup-to-nuts automated contracting solution. We have those, they're fine but they're not going to bring about world peace. What we really need is an industry-wide API-like-thing to provide a higher base to build all the other contracting solutions on top of. Right now the default API is "English language" and law of your choice. That's too hard of a problem to solve transparently with technology and it presents a learning curve that's hard to justify with an endgame of vendor lock-in and product instability. And you can only do so much if you're the only contracting party "speaking" that API. Designing a replacement API isn't easy either, and industry adoption may be nigh impossible from the position of a startup. But these folks seem clever and they think big so something to watch.

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ricksunny 5y ago

We used Legalese.com for a Singapore SAFE agreement. Loved it.

danielrhodes 5y ago

There's a well known book on law called "An Introduction to Legal Reasoning". And in this book, it more or less calls out this scenario on the first page. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5687&context=journal_articles https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... "The pretense is that the law is a system of known rules applied by a judge; the pretense has long been under attack. In an important sense legal rules are never clear, and, if a rule had to be clear before it could be imposed, society would be impossible. The mechanism accepts the differences of view and ambiguities of words. It provides for the participation of the community in resolving the ambiguity by providing a forum for the discussion of policy in the gap of ambiguity. On serious controversial questions, it makes it possible to take the first step in the direction of what otherwise would be forbidden ends. The mechanism is indispensable to peace in a community." I've thought a lot about this because it directly impacts whether you could turn a contract into code. Code is for the most part very deterministic - you can expect that the logic you use will be interpreted in the same way every time given the same inputs. When that isn't the case, it's generally considered a bug. Law and contracts appear to be deterministic, but are in fact not. Anything that is written into a law or contract is subject to interpretation later. There's no attempt at making it exhaustive because it's not possible, nor is it necessarily desirable. Sometimes contracts contain language that becomes invalid later on, and you don't want to define things too tightly or you'll have to modify the contract non-stop. Sometimes things arise which are not spelled out in the contract and as long as the parties agree, there's no problem. The rules around contracts are a lot more bendable than in code, and "it depends" is quite often the answer to many questions. So is there overlap between code and contracts/law? Certainly. But the deeper you go, the more exceptions that arise.

davidm888 5y ago
I agree completely, and the quote you cited more eloquently describes what I was trying to convey in some of my earlier comments. Coming from a software-development mindset, I started practicing law twenty years ago, and the hardest adjustment to make was to understand that even though the law seemed analogous to deterministic code on the surface, in reality it is much different. Today, both writing code and practicing law, I still have to remind myself of the difference sometimes. It is a completely different mindset when dealing with ambiguity, especially in the cases where ambiguity is sometimes desired, welcomed, or necessary. It is also eye-opening to realize that the parties never consider all of the future possibilities, and as such, it's not even possible for a document, however syntactically correct, to convey the intent of the parties 100% -- they don't even know their full intent as to infinite possibilities. I think many of the commenters, just like I did before, struggle to understand this. They don't realize that the "flaw" they're trying to correct is actually a feature -- a messy, sometimes annoying, irrational, subjective, human, necessary feature that's actually an important part of the functioning of society. It's intoxicating to think of a purely logical society driven by immutable, consistent, and brutally efficient laws for everyone, but upon further thought, it's a bit terrifying. Thankfully, it's also impossible.

tgbugs 5y ago

The problem here isn't that we are missing a language for expressing laws. Indeed, DSLs for expressing legal axioms don't really exist, and I expect that formal verifiable languages will be created, but even when they are, the problem is not an inability to express laws, the problem is how to map them to entities in the real world. To give only a single example, "what is admissible evidence?" Assume for a moment that we have solved the "what is admissible evidence in this context" problem. Now you have a giant list of pieces of evidence, testimony, etc. How do you prove chain of custody? The legal system is utterly blind to the world, its agents are intentionally blinded to much of the information, and practically blinded to others. Even with modern surveillance the amount of uncertainty that is present in many legal cases is substantial, and machine learning won't help you here, because every legal case is a one off. I'm sure someone will try to create a statistical guilt detection net despite the obviousness that it will inevitably produce unjust results. If you want laws to be written in formal languages, you need a system for defining formal semantics for the entities and relations that their abstracted axioms describe, and things like OWL and RDF are not sufficient, because they only provides the hypotheses, not the evidence. You can assert that evidence subClassOf admissible-evidence, but you need proof that the assertion is valid that can be checked by multiple parties (or anyone with the desire to do so). The one-off nature of many cases often means that you can't go out and test the hypothesis again. These are hard measurement problems, and we don't have a good language for describing them, and how the measurements themselves are governed by the legals system. That said, being able to bootstrap simulate court cases with juries drawn from the population would already be a massive win for interrogating laws and their implementation and enforcement. Similarly being able to simulate new legislation to reveal loopholes would be fantastic, though I doubt politicians would enjoy that. There is quite a bit of data, but I don't think it is particularly amenable to the current fads in machine learning. Amusingly people complain that we'll never be able to write down all the axioms, yet someone wrote down all the laws. Economically unattractive due to a tragedy of the commons certainly, but at the end of the day someone is going to have to write down all the axioms, one way or another. Maybe modern machine learning techniques could be used to generate the axioms for humans to review?

abraxaz 5y ago
Given that OWL and RDF is meant for both open world data and data models, and is amenable to partial specification, it really solves the problem of relating legal rules to the rest of the world quite well. In your legal ontology you just specify evidence, and admissible evidence, and then another ontology can pick up from there and model it in a specific domain. And OWL has formal and provable entailment rules. So everyone can agree, given samme ontologies what the implications are. There are unsolved problems there but most of the things you list are already thought through.

penguin_linux 5y ago

I'm finding it really difficult to understand what this software actually does. The name interests me... but wow this site is difficult read

ibejoeb 5y ago

Contract fuzzing will give rise to the worst, most litigious trolls ever...

mengwong 5y ago

One of the most salutary responses to the ambition of bringing "digital transformation" to the legal industry comes from PaulG himself: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1384422654195683328 https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1384422654195683328 > In 2008 I spent a month writing a web-based system for managing all YC's funding documents. With one click you could get an instance of the latest docs, prepopulated with all the startup's info from our database. The lawyers quietly ignored it and kept using Microsoft Word. Others have said in the comments that doctors and lawyers are "the last, most powerful guilds" remaining. On the one hand, it's easy to call for "the end of lawyers". (The Legalese website says that sort of thing as a provocation, a way of staking a flag in the sand.) On the other, it's likely that society will always define a special role for the white-collar warrior, the champion of the courtroom; for high-stakes, once-in-a-lifetime situations, you want expert human hand-holding. In books like https://www.amazon.com/Future-Professions-Technology-Transform-Experts-ebook/dp/B010N9QJ5M https://www.amazon.com/Future-Professions-Technology-Transfo... Richard Susskind offers a more nuanced middle ground. Look at medicine: together, the Apple Watch, WebMD, DirectLabs, home glucose monitors, and home blood pressure monitors (let us never miss an opportunity to say "sphygmomanometer") allow millions of people to do for themselves what they used to need a doctor for. In turn, that lets doctors focus on more high-value work. Suppose we distinguish quantitative and qualitative reasoning: numbers belong to the former; legal and logical problem-solving to the latter. Quantitative reasoning went in-house when spreadsheets (the original killer app) landed on the PC: now millions of people do for themselves what a couple of generations ago used to be the domain of the accountant, the bookkeeper, the finance specialist. What would "spreadsheets for law" look like? If tools emerge that allow laypeople at home and in business to explore for themselves simple questions like "what is the deadline for me to do X", "what things am I required to prepare ahead of that deadline", and "how do I get out of doing Y", frankly the lawyers might breathe a sigh of relief so they don't have to keep annoying people by answering "it depends". There's plenty of low-hanging fruit out there like that which makes people's lives better. Software like docassemble.org and startups like afterpattern.com are exploring these possibilities. Farther into the science-fiction future, researchers in France did a lovely demo, basically fuzzing the tax code to find a sploit that deserved to be patched. https://blog.merigoux.fr/en/2019/12/20/taxes-formal-proofs.html https://blog.merigoux.fr/en/2019/12/20/taxes-formal-proofs.h... One final point: people who argue for the necessity of discretion and the desirability of vagueness and ambiguity tend to have, in the past, benefited from such discretion. But there are less privileged people out there who have been on the sharp receiving end of discretion, and they might prefer a little less discretion and a little more algorithmic, explainable, deterministic fairness!

roel_v 5y ago

This reads like it's something new, and maybe parts of it are, and probably any implementation will be 'new' in the sense that it uses recent technical innovations; but when I was in law school 10 years ago, I had a professor (with a chair in 'computational law' or something like that) who had been doing such things since the 1980's. Being a software developer in law school, I looked into his field quite a bit (there have been entire conferences on this topic since the 1980's) and there have been a lot of 'research projects' that explored various parts of what it seems this project is proposing; but none of them practical or big enough to make any impact. And, as usual in academia, it then dies off when the funding ends and the next cycle begins. Anyway, I'm interested to see what will come out of this, but I see very little awareness of past work, which might be because they want to make it look more revolutionary than it is; or because they're reinventing the wheel. Time will tell.

cblconfederate 5y ago

It looks like a new legal system would be more useful. Law is intentionally vague for all sorts of reasons both good and nefarious. Computational law is automated contracts. OTOH if they succeed at coding a large % of finance law, they 'll have created an excellent machine to find loopholes to exploit.

syats 5y ago

One very basic prerequisite for the approach (vaguely) outlined in the link, is to have machine-readable contracts/law/etc. We can debate hours what machine-readable means, but definitely text in varying fonts and layouts IN AN IMAGE does not point in that direction.

Alkim 5y ago

An important aspect of this is that it is located in Singapore. Singapore is a heavily regulated sandbox in many, many areas. And it is small. For example, there is only a single companies registry and only a single tax authority. And Singapore has a history of mandating big changes. And a lot of effort sunk into presenting itself as cutting edge in terms of government services and management of its population. I'd suggest that it may be possible for Legalese to try some things in Singapore, perhaps in concert with one of the government authorities, that could be an interesting demonstrator. (Disclosure: One of the founders is a good friend, and I am wishing them success.)

TheMagicHorsey 5y ago

The project seems to miss the fact that when you build an English to DSL compiler, if there are problems with the compiler, the English will prevail under our court system ... not the compiled DSL. As a result, the computational legal infrastructure will slowly diverge from what the actual legal outcome would be. That's problematic.

billytetrud 5y ago

I came across legalese a few years back. Looks like they've come a long way!