That means a lot, Mike.

Thanks so much for checking it out!

Thanks a ton!

Thanks! Pumped to see how it goes!

Thank you so much!

Sure thing!

I also would want a lawyer to take a look. Hence the note saying to talk to a lawyer. ;)

The reality is, even knowing what to ask a lawyer can be difficult and it's not economically viable to ask a lawyer to summarize a 100-page legal document into text you can wrap your head around.

Detangle just helps give some clarity so that you can further a conversation with a lawyer, or even just ask for clarification from the person who sent you the document.

"Hey, this paragraph seems to imply XYZ...is that the case?"

I'm making zero claims that this should replace a lawyer or be used as a replacement for legally binding text.

> even knowing what to ask a lawyer can be difficult

That's the lawyer's job, to guide you through ! If they're not doing that, then find a different lawyer.

The whole point is we are talking about legal document review here.

Reviewing legal documents necessarily involves an active discussion with a lawyer, it is not something you can turn up with pre-prepared questions for.

> That's the lawyer's job, to guide you through ! If they're not doing that, then find a different lawyer.

Yes! And if you happen to know that, and have a good lawyer, then you're all set. But a hell of a lot of lawyers won't volunteer to do this, or aren't competent enough to have this conversation productively with a layperson, and most people don't know to ask for it.

I have my doubts as to the practicality, but a tool that could summarize and then prompt laypeople go to their lawyer to start that discussion seems like it could definitely have value. I suspect most people interested in this tool may already be knowledgeable enough to ask for a walkthrough anyway, but you could imagine implementations where the summary is presented directly, and could guide more people toward the help they need.

> competent enough to have this conversation productively with a layperson

HUH ? That is literally their job !

Legal document review is bread and butter for lawyers.

Having productive conversations with laypeople is what lawyers do all day every day.

I really don't get your point.

If a lawyer is unable to have a productive conversation with a layperson about a legal document, then they need to be stripped of their qualifications.

That’s not their job - their job is to make persuasive legal arguments, craft legal language to be ironclad, etc. Similarly a top researchers in CS isn’t employed for their ability to explain CS, despite the fact we employ them to do just that.

That's true, but you still should (try to) be prepared. Meeting with a lawyer will go much more smoothly if you have at least a rudimentary understanding of the subject matter, rather than having them explain everything to you from first principles.

And you can also waste half the time having the lawyer explain to you that what detangle told you was wrong...

> The reality is, even knowing what to ask a lawyer can be difficult and it's not economically viable to ask a lawyer to summarize a 100-page legal document into text you can wrap your head around.

A 100 page legal document (i.e. one with lots of stuff implied by structure and lots of specific subconditions and lots of case-specific stuff that might make more sense in conjunction with the examples in the appendix) sounds like the sort of thing AI would be wrong about far more often than it was right...

At least reading a short contract or EULA I'd be pretty confident an AI-based system would have lots of similar contracts and plain English explanations in its corpus and correctly identify the boilerplate exclusions and even if it misinterpreted stuff like IP assignments and ability to modify the agreement it might be slightly better than Ctrl-F at figuring out which clauses do this. Although from what I can see the current incarnation is working on a paragraph by paragraph basis so doesn't even necessarily apply definitions defined in the section above correctly...

The AI couldn't even get the directionality of the first paragraph of the YCombinator SAFE, it's in this thread.

Question: how much would it cost to consult a lawyer about a 100 page document? How does one even go about doing something like this? I've never really needed to do that, so I'm genuinely curious.

You call a lawyer up, tell them what you need, and the lawyer will either give you an estimate, or agree to a cost, and send you an engagement letter.

We use GPT-3 to summarize it the document data. Then 24 hours later we completely delete all text, URLs and file uploads.

No way any respectable lawyer thinks it's OK to upload a client agreement with confidential information to some fly by night website the promises to delete.

You do nothing with the data in the interim? I find that hard to believe.

Thanks so much!

Detangle gives you AI-generated summaries of your legal docs so you can understand what you're signing.

Here's the YC SAFE, for example: https://detangle.ai/examples/yc-safe

I'm excited to see where this goes because I think it is a cool application of AI. That said, two of the first three paragraph summaries are wrong in this example:

> [Investor Name] gave [Company Name] the right to certain shares of its Capital Stock in exchange for [Amount] on [Date].

This is backwards

> The Post-Money Valuation Cap is a number that is written in Section 2.

This isn't true, the number is here, "additional defined terms" are later.

It's anywhere from slightly to very wrong for each section. Pretty cool as a tech demo but definitely should not be used to understand a legal document.

I wonder, what happens when you read just the summary of a complex section, sign, and then years later are in a lawsuit. If Detangled's algorithm in shown to have clearly written the summary wrong... are they in any way liable? hehe notice their own terms with summaries: https://detangle.ai/terms

From the original text:

> We may suspend or terminate your right to use our website and terminate these Terms of Service immediately upon written notice to you for any breach of these Terms of Service.

From the summary:

> We can end this agreement any time we want.

I read these as being quite different? The original text says they can only terminate for a breach by the user of the ToS, not simply "any time we want".

I get that the service isn't supposed to replace actual legal advice but surely differences as glaring as these limit the usefulness of the summaries.

That was the big reason for adding the massive disclaimer everywhere, but I guess we'll see.

I also intentionally didn't just give an output of the summary but instead showed it next to each paragraph so the implication isn't that the summaries replaces the legal, but rather tries to clarify.

Glad you noticed the Terms. :)

> AI-generated summaries of your legal docs so you can understand what you're signing.

If you sell me a summary of a legal document, which was advertised as being useful to understand the legal document, that seems like just about the most straightforward case of legal advice I can imagine.

Absolutely fantastic! This is a great use of AI here, definitely using this going forward. A bit concerned though, the LLC name doesn't give confidence when reading through the output with confidence.