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Understand contracts before you sign them
- digitalengineer 12y ago"LawGeex compares your legal document to thousands of others in our database" They should start selling those as well.
- cowsandmilk 12y agoProbably cannot. Many databases of this type are constructed with confidentiality agreements.
- song 12y agoI clicked on Register Now and got a 404 page.
- lawgeex 12y agoHi I am sorry that you experienced a 404 page error message. Our tech team is investigating the problem. Thanks for reporting the problem
- lucb1e 12y agoThat response sounds an awful lot like customer service at a major ISP, or automatic email replies in helpdesk systems.
- lawgeex 12y agoSorry for not coming up with a more original response- but thats the truth :) On our side, everything is working ok, and the site is running well, so our tech guys have to investigate why a user experienced an error
- ZeroMinx 12y agofwiw, with uBlock enabled, the Register link takes me to https://www.lawgeex.com/static/Error.html https://www.lawgeex.com/static/Error.html If I disable uBlock, it works.
- yvoschaap2 12y agoIt's caused by (some) ad blockers because you call ga() (google analytics) in your javascript which loads through google tag manager which is blocked from loading by default with uBlock for example. This all causing the modal window to not show, leading to a catch error forwarding to your 404 page.
- lawgeex 12y agoThank you for bringing this to our attention. You are 100% correct and we fixed the problem
- vertex-four 12y agoIt's a javascript popup. Enable javascript.
- joosters 12y agoI get it too and I have javascript enabled. The URL is https://www.lawgeex.com/static/Error.html https://www.lawgeex.com/static/Error.html - which isn't too helpful for a 404 ! Also, the error page breaks my browser's back button.
- vertex-four 12y agoHuh... somehow it works on Firefox, but not on my Chromebook. :(
- imjustsaying 12y agoFor me, - 404 when connecting from mozilla android with China IP, - page crashed on my netbook from chrome with China IP, - loads fine with mozilla with Japan IP & ublock enabled.
- alphydan 12y agoTried a PDF and a .docx and got an << Unsupported document type >> error.
- lawgeex 12y agoHi thank you for uploading a doc. Currently we only support residential leases. If you were uploading a residential lease and got this message, i would appreciate if you could email me the doc contactlg@lawgeex.com so our tech team can investigate.
- cdnsteve 12y agoRegister seems to be crashing under load.
- jas78 12y agoSame here...
- julius 12y agoI really hope this (or something like it) will succeed. There are so many situations, where a lawyer would be helpful, but is too much of a hassle to get involved (often because they are expensive). AI lawyers giving plain language information and indicating areas where you want to get a real lawyer involved sound pretty neat. @lawgeex: Your Headline with the Register-Button is weirdly aligned to the left in my browser (Win+FF), not sure if this is intentional. It looks wrong, as all the following sections are well centered.
- _jomo 12y ago> @2015 LawGeex. All Rights Reserved Not sure if that's a typo, but I like it. It's different.
- davedx 12y ago> Currently, Lawgeex only supports residential lease agreements Sadface.
- mootothemax 12y agoI'm always shocked by the number of people who don't read the contracts they sign. It's one thing if you have hundreds of pages of legalese in front of you - I can see the value of a service such as this, or hiring your own lawyer for such cases - but for a few pages, five minutes of your time max, I just don't understand why so many people don't take the time to do so. One habit I've noticed in highly successful people is that they don't skim over bits of contracts (something I'm certainly guilty of); everything is read in detail. Does anyone have any anecdotal stories about successful people not taking 10 minutes to read a contract?
- kyle_t 12y agoI think there are two things at play here. 1. People perceive they don't have a choice. For example when you visit the doctor and you have to sign 12 different form/contracts. Most people believe they either sign them or don't get treated. 2. Fear of not understanding. They think they wouldn't understand they legalese even if they tried, so why even bother? Personally I don't blame them. I've read contracts that were so wordy and had so much legalese in them you'd be convinced the lawyers wrote them that way just so everyone involved would need to hire as many lawyers as possible simply to understand the darn thing.
- mootothemax 12y agoThanks, those are some really interesting points! I still find both explanations a bit strange, though. I mean, wouldn't you at least like to know whether there are any restrictions on operating a company from your rented accommodation, even if you perceive that you don't have any choice in it? Or even just where you stand in general? I've also read some crazy legalese, but the thing is that I've read a heck of a lot more contracts that aren't legalese, and are very easy to understand. That leaves me wondering whether it's the common introductory bits (e.g. that state "THE TENANT is John Smith") that make people give up early?
- dredmorbius 12y agoI've walked out of businesses and/or offices on account of contract terms offered. There is that option.
- pdkl95 12y agoWe have the ability to calculate a rough estimate of the time required to read a given text. This means we can create a law that states that for a contract to be valid, each party must be given at least 80% of that time[1] for the contract to be considered valid. Don't want to give the necessary 30-60min? Don't write so long of a contract, or figure out a way to do without. [1] 20% is to remove any margin of error in the calculation; the exact amount is configurable
- ta75757 12y agoRead or understand? This is legalese we're talking about.
- pdkl95 12y agoUnderstanding is beyond the scope of what I'd like to see fixed in contract law. The idea is that if you have a 5 page contract, it should have taken at least 8 minutes[1] to read regardless of if it is legalease or written in a plain style. It's a lower bound. Failure to satisfy that bound can then be seen as prima facie evidence that the has not been a "meeting of the minds", due to one party being given sufficient time to even read the contract. As I tried to imply, there are various configurable details here that would need to be negotiated; I just believe that some sort of minimum bound should be established in law. The alternative is to allow the current trend of de facto contracts of adhesion to grow. [1] or whatever the length of time is calculated to be - I just made up this number
- Lawtonfogle 12y agoSo effectively, the individual signing must spend 8 minutes doing nothing but looking at the contract (even if they are daydreaming). I can see where this is would be a concrete improvement, even if just a minor one to a much larger problem.
- Lawtonfogle 12y agoSo effectively, the individual signing must spend 8 minutes doing nothing but looking at the contract (even if they are daydreaming). I can see where this is would be a concrete improvement, even if just a minor one to a much larger problem.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- bdg 12y agoI tried to register and was taken to a broken page.
- jmuhlich 12y agoI think a sample report (from a fictitious but plausible contract) would be helpful to clearly explain what the service does.
- lawgeex 12y agoThank you for the idea. We were thinking of adding a short video or screenshots when we release the updated Beta version of LawGeex
- jmuguy 12y agoI had you analyze the monster 37 page lease I just signed for a new apartment. It looked mostly boilerplate to me with several addendums attached. I'm not sure your engine was able to process the PDF, it just sort of spit back a page of "issues" that were garbled text and weird characters. I can't seem to get back to the page I was on now either.
- lawgeex 12y agoHi Thank you for trying to upload your monster 37 page lease :) I apologise that LawGeex didn't work. So that we can figure out why it didn't work, I would really appreciate if you can email PDF to contactlg@lawgeex.com so that our tech team can take a look at it. Many thanks
- grabeh 12y agoInteresting premise. I often wonder about liability issues in these kind of intermediary cases. The tenant signs agreement on basis of plain English summary. Landlord seeks to enforce agreement. Subsequently it turns out there is an error in the summarisation process and an important clause was missed or incorrectly summarised. Yes, the tenant will be liable to the landlord but a cause of action may be available against the intermediary. Clearly the intermediary will have various disclaimers in their terms of use but that doesn't greatly assist the tenant and reduces the value of the proposition from the tenant's perspective. Certain disclaimers may be unlawful under consumer protection law also. I tried to upload the following as a .docx document but got the 'Unsupported document' error. RESIDENTIAL LEASE Landlord permits you to stay in the property for 6 months from 1 January 2016. In consideration you agree to provide Landlord with your firstborn within 30 days of his/her birth, or in the absence of children prior to 1 December 2020, $1,000,000 no later than 1 January 2021. …………………………………. Landlord …………………………………… Tenant As an aside, as a site extolling the virtues of plain English in agreements, I would have thought you could have put some effort into providing plain English terms of use. Finally, any stats on the territory breakdown between the 60k documents that have been uploaded? Would be fascinated to see this!
- PeterWhittaker 12y agoInteresting. NOTE: With cookies disabled, a 404 page is displayed. That's very confusing.
- uiri 12y agoI feel like this would be great from employment contracts and nondisclosure agreements where the asymmetry of the situation is rather large and, depending on the company, the contract may actually be long enough to warrant a professional analysis. Of course, collecting multiple contracts from the same employer would help with pointing out what is actually unusual/normal (for that particular employer). Residential leases seems like one of the worst contract markets to start off with. Firstly, because what is legal and illegal to put in a lease varies from place to place. For instance, in Ontario, it is illegal to collect a security deposit (a deposit may be collected but it can only be used towards last month's rent). Secondly, what is normal and what is unusual will also vary, most likely on a much finer grained level (ie: by city/town rather than by state/province). Thirdly, you'll have to deal with leases from less-than-professional landlords (e.g. using a lease drafted according to the rather different laws of a different province/state). Fourthly, the lease will vary a lot depending on the landlord (ie: large property management company vs small property manager vs individual owner-landlord) and the accomodations (ie: house vs condo vs apartment). Lastly, few residential leases need to be more than about 5 pages long, including all the things the landlord has added over the years after being burned by various bad tenants. If there is a problem, the landlord and tenant will either resolve it or: if the landlord wants the tenant to move out, either it is easy to evict or it is difficult to evict but nothing in the lease will change that that much and if the tenant wants to move out, they will break the lease and good luck to the landlord suing the tenant trying to get the money back (the tenant risks very little by breaking the lease if they are not going to rely on the current landlord as a reference for future landlords). I doubt there is a special clause which can be put into a residential lease which will make it more difficult for the tenant to break it. Then again, I rarely find legalese which I can't parse (although sometimes it seems written in such a way that it will take me a full five minutes) so perhaps I'm not in the target market for this kind of service.
- joshuaheard 12y agoAs a lawyer, I am always excited to see innovation in the legal space. This seems like an interesting concept: using an algorithm to summarize a document (contract) and to flag unusual clauses. Put the document in, and out comes the legal blessing. However, I am a little concerned about the viability of this concept in terms of producing a valuable analysis. A true analysis considers the context of a document. For instance, a one-year term is a common residential lease clause. However, what if the tenant was under a 6 month employment contract and needed to change locations? The algorithm would not know this and would not flag the clause. Or what if the tenant was 17 years old and couldn't legally sign contracts in the first place? Sometimes interpretation of a contract comes down to the exact wording of a contract. Most boilerplate language is the result of years of evolution and precedent. A summary might subtly change or obscure the meaning. Finally, you are getting very close, if not into, the unauthorized practice of law. I recommend contacting your state bar association for feedback. That being said, I input my email address into your website and look forward to monitoring your progress.
- Balgair 12y agoThink of it as a first pass. Yes, you'll have to go over it again anyways, but the 'flags' it pulls out give a little bit of landmarks and a tiny bit of extra awareness that you may have missed. It's probably going to have a error rate much higher than yours, but it's errors have a chance of being not yours and it may catch things you missed. The real question is how much better of a lawyer does it make you? Can it save you 1 hour a day, 1 hour a week, 1 hour a month? And if it can, how much does that cost you in terms of billable hours or whatever your rates are like?
- joshuaheard 12y agoIf this service is for lawyers, then it could have value. However, most lawyers pass their time costs onto their clients, so they have no incentive to be efficient. I would aim at corporate lawyers, although it's a very small market.
- Balgair 12y ago
- antihero 12y agoI tried to upload a PDF and a TXT file and it said they were both unsupported :(
- mike_ivanov 12y agoJust have tried to register, got this: Server Error in '/' Application. The resource cannot be found. Firefox/Mac.
- lawgeex 12y agoThank you for bringing this to our attention. Our tech team will look into this.
- api 12y agoJust the title of this is along the lines of "check if the crocodile is real or plastic before sticking your head in its mouth."
- elliottwilliams 12y agolooks a lot like what I built with NLP months ago: https://freelancers.legalsifter.com/ https://freelancers.legalsifter.com/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/07/legalsifter-helps-designers-and-developers-read-their-contracts/ http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/07/legalsifter-helps-designers...
- ccvannorman 12y agoThis is a GODSEND. Legalese has long been used to irritate and take advantage of customers who don't have time to read every contract. Short of rewriting the laws to require plain english overviews of contracts, this is the next best thing! Great work guys! Note: I didn't click on the link the first 3 times I saw it because (of the title) I assumed it was an article telling me I ought to read contracts ;-]