Template:M intro technology Better call ChatGPT: Difference between revisions

{{Drop|T}}here is one peculiarity that a literal approach to contract review cannot address, but we should mention: sometimes a contract’s true significance runs tangentially to its content. The forensic detail is not always the point.<ref>This is, broadly, true of all contracts, from execution until formal enforcement — and the overwhelming majority of contracts are never formally enforced.</ref>

Sometimes the ''act'' of finely thrashing the details out even ''frustrates'' the true purpose of the contract, which is to fulfil a sociological function. As a commitment signal or competence signal.  

A basic example: European financial services regulations require institutions to have written contracts with all customers, as a regulatory end in itself. They are less prescriptive about what the contracts should ''say''. You must, therefore, have a written contract to do business. To meet that end, ''any'' delay in finalising the contract in the name of “getting it right” is cause for regret.<ref>You might be surprised how often firms are obliged to negotiate their terms and conditions, in that it is not “never”.</ref>

In other cases contracts act as a mating ritual, of sorts: a performative ululation of customary cultural verities meant signal that yes, we care about the same things you do, are of the right stuff, the same mind and our ad idems are capable of consensus. Again, it matters less what the contract says then it is ''there''.

If it is that — most [[NDA]]s are that — then descending into the subterranean pedantry and exactitude that an LLM offers, in the service of “picking up things that even a trained paralegal might not” can be even counterproductive. The point is to carry out the ritual; accord these pleasantries the required respect but to not labour them.

Now. That aside: with high-volume, low-risk legal processes — especially where they do not play a part in the courting rites — the name of the game is not fast, efficient and precise negotiation, but no negotiation. Negotiation is the problem. If you find customers regularly negotiate your standard terms of business, or you get regular snarl-ups on procurement processes and end-user sale contracts you have bad contracts. Fix them.  

This might be a matter of formal redesign, or persuading legal to come to Jesus on the preposterous width of the exclusion of liability and indemnity — but the answer is not to excellently negotiate individual contracts. This leaves you with two enduring problems: first, your portfolio of homogenous customer sale contracts are not homogenous; secondly, you have now overlaid administrative machinery upon a bad process — that generates non-standard contracts — that will be hard to remove. By appointing unskilled bureaucrats and technocrats to oversee and manage that process, and likely other unskilled bureaucrats to oversee and monitor them , you have institutionalised bad process.  

John Gall’s [[Systemantics]]  captures this well. Temporary fixes have a habit of becoming permanent. Bureaucrats are butterfly collectors: they do not give up responsibilities without a fight. Before long, this process will have itself sedimented into the administrative sludge that weighs your organisation down.

LLMs can’t function by themselves (yet: we are not quite at the point of skynet, however much techno-utopians might hanker for it). They imply not saved legal cost, but “waste” transferred: it will be diffused among software-as-a-service providers, the firm’s procurement complex, internal audit, operations and, yes, legal who will still have to handle exceptions, manage and troubleshoot the system, vouch for it, periodically certify its legal adequacy  and present it to the opco

LLMs as finite. They necessarily mimic what has gone before. While yes alpha go might engineer a novel strategy in a zero sum game, it is not so easy on in the non linear infinitude of life. An LLM that purports to improve on its training material will be distrusted it doesn’t understand, so what good had it got of reimagining?