Contract analysis: Difference between revisions

no edit summary
No edit summary
No edit summary
Tags: Mobile edit Mobile web edit
Line 8: Line 8:
''Three hundred and sixty thousand hours of professional work carried out in seconds''. Sounds — literally — incredible, doesn’t it? Preternaturally intelligent silicon minds scanning and processing gigabytes of diverse text in an instant and analysing it for all material quirks and issues, like Zen from ''Blake’s Seven''. [[Get your coat]], [[legal eagles]].
''Three hundred and sixty thousand hours of professional work carried out in seconds''. Sounds — literally — incredible, doesn’t it? Preternaturally intelligent silicon minds scanning and processing gigabytes of diverse text in an instant and analysing it for all material quirks and issues, like Zen from ''Blake’s Seven''. [[Get your coat]], [[legal eagles]].
===Contract analysis or data extraction?===
===Contract analysis or data extraction?===
But let’s just stop and consider what is actually going on here: a  bank seeking to reviewing tens and probably ''hundreds'' of thousands of ''its own'' commercial loans. These loans will be rendered in the hideous, overwrought prose of the banking lawyer, to be sure, but — even allowing for template variations and [[Legal evolution|evolution]] (by which I mean periodic [[Cambrian explosion]]s  of [[flannel|flannelry]] to which not even the House of Morgan is immune), ''the contracts will all be basically the same''. If there has been a modicum of legal design applied — okay, that’s quite a big if — there will be a predictable schedule of customer details and economic variables — dates, amounts, currencies, rates, and optional elections — but the ''legal terms'', however gruesomely articulated, will be homogeneous and, in any case ''within the bank’s control'': a commercial bank with half a brain won’t ''allow'' its customers to wordsmith its standard terms. If it does, then ''that'' is the problem to be solved, not “how can I possibly understand all these varied terms I have agreed with hundreds of thousands of customers?”  
But let’s just stop and consider what is actually going on here: a  bank seeking to reviewing tens and probably ''hundreds'' of thousands of ''its own'' commercial loans. These loans will be rendered in the hideous, overwrought prose of the banking lawyer, to be sure, but — even allowing for template variations and [[Legal evolution|evolution]] (by which I mean periodic [[Cambrian explosion]]s  of [[flannel|flannelry]] to which not even the House of Morgan is immune), ''the contracts will all be basically the same''. If there has been a modicum of [[legal design]] applied — okay, that’s quite a big if — there will be a predictable schedule of customer details and economic variables — dates, amounts, currencies, rates, and optional elections — but the ''legal terms'', however gruesomely articulated, will be homogeneous and, in any case ''within the bank’s control'': a commercial bank with half a brain won’t ''allow'' its customers to wordsmith its standard terms. If it does, then ''that'' is the problem to be solved, not “how can I possibly understand all these varied terms I have agreed with hundreds of thousands of customers?”  


Note the irony: it was only thanks to this kind of technology that we can even ''contemplate'' micro-variations to standard terms: behold the [[technology paradox]]: what Andy Grove giveth, the [[legal eagle]]’s innate appetite for pedantry taketh away. Technology that allows one to ''ignore'' the [[root cause]] of the problem and carry on anyway is ''bad'' technology.  
Note the irony: it was only thanks to this kind of technology that we can even ''contemplate'' micro-variations to standard terms: behold the [[technology paradox]]: what Andy Grove giveth, the [[legal eagle]]’s innate appetite for pedantry taketh away. Technology that allows one to ''ignore'' the [[root cause]] of the problem and carry on anyway is ''bad'' technology.