Crowdsourced Legal Advice

12 points by elliottwilliams 12 years ago | 7 comments

Right now I'm banking on the fact that lawyers copy and paste. This is a fair assumption as they have "clause libraries" at all major firms.

In the future I'd hope to tie in the NLP stuff we've been working on to do fuzzy matching.

We're highlighting text we've seen before, so it should be easy to see which lines are actually unique text.

andrewfong 12 years ago | |

FYI: You should reply using the reply links. It's easier to follow threads that way.

Also, does the matching handle blanks or minor variations? Typical clause libraries often taken this form: "The Company hereby agrees to sell you [_________________] shares of stock." You probably wouldn't need NLP to match that.

elliottwilliams 12 years ago | | |

Sorry about not using the reply. I was wondering why my comment was on top.

Right now I've got some off the shelf NLP stuff that does Org and Name recognition to remove those things (I've been working on a similar project for a while). The lines should be trivial but not yet implemented. Most "get screwed" clauses don't have underlines as they are boiler plate.

elliottwilliams 12 years ago |

People comment on their own documents. If your doc has the same text as someone else's, we share their comments with you.

joeyespo 12 years ago |

This is cool!

Question for you. How do you handle legal copy that isn't in anyone else's document? Or does this not happen often enough?

Even if there's some unique copy, are there plans to let you know which lines they are in your document? It would be useful to give those lines to a lawyer for review instead of an entire document.

andrewfong 12 years ago |

I'm a little confused. How does blind commenting work? That is, how can I comment on a legal document without seeing the text of said document?

aclevernickname 12 years ago |

Fantastic app. Thank you for making this.