The Logic of Legal Agreements - Building a Legal Reasoner

William S. Veatch
The Logic of Legal Agreements – Building a Legal Reasoner

Digital Transformation of Contracts – Ontologies, Structured Data, and AI

This 70 page book is the second of three new books in a series of books about AI and the Law, that describe the tools of math and logic that are available to us as we continue down the path of Digital Transformation of Contracts, to a new world where data is king. We have the technology to convert contracts to structured data; now it is a matter of implementing the technology to achieve standardization in accordance with best practices.

(i) Ontology of Legal Contracts – Focus on Finance: An ontology describes and classifies the legal concepts used in contracts, and the relationships among those concepts.

(ii) The Logic of Legal Agreements – Building a Legal Reasoner: We are beginning to develop software applications that apply math and logic to mimic the way that lawyers think and reason.

(iii) The Mathematics of Language: A new understanding of language in mathematical terms has developed in recent years. Natural language processing soon will be transformed to enable the processing of contracts and statutes as math and logic equations.

Why now? The current focus is on converting ordinary contracts to structured data, but this will change. Just like when the movie industry converted from film to digital, there is an interim period where we need to convert existing material to a digital format. Once the conversion is complete, however, the focus shifts to origination in a digital format. We are already beginning to shift to originating contracts in a digital, structured data format. These books provide a blueprint for the origination of contracts and statutes as structured data, which is the long-term solution to contract and portfolio management.

Target audience: Anyone implementing the Digital Transformation of Contracts and/or Statutes, including: (i) inhouse lawyers at corporations, finance companies, banks, and government agencies, who use standardized documents in their business, and (ii) LegalTech experts who want to learn more about how lawyers think about the law.

Target industries: Any industry that uses standard form contracts, including financial services (e.g., banking and FinTech), equipment leasing, vendor finance (software and equipment), technology, healthcare, life sciences, energy transition, insurance, retail, etc. Also, we can use the same technology to convert statutes to structured data.

Caution: This is not light reading, but if you are interested in applying math and logic to drafting contracts as structured data, then these books are for you. The three new books are written at a higher level and contain less math. The other books provide a detailed foundation in math and logic for those who want (or need) to know more.

This book about Logic is written by a practicing attorney, for use by practicing attorneys. It should also be of interest to anyone involved in creating artificial intelligence software applications for use in the practice of law.