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Legal documents are pushing text interfaces forward | thesephist.com

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A core research interest of mine is imagining new kinds of interfaces to text documents that are made possible by modern AI and software. I think an interesting place to look for such ideas may be interface designs for reading and writing legal documents. Legal document-wrangling tools have a handful of properties that make it fertile ground for innovative ways for humans to interact with text-dense documents: If you squint, legal text looks a lot like source code: there are terms, their definitions, and references to them, and they have to form graphs that obey certain rules (only one definition per term, all references to terms have to resolve, and so on). There is also established syntax norms around how terms are defined, how sections and subsections are notated, how court cases and external links are named, and how all these concepts are referenced in-line in the “source code”, if you will, of contracts and laws. Because of this structured and regular nature of legal text, I think

A core research interest of mine is imagining new kinds of interfaces to text documents that are made possible by modern AI and software. I think an interesting place to look for such ideas may be interface designs for reading and writing legal documents . Legal document-wrangling tools have a handful of properties that make it fertile ground for innovative ways for humans to interact with text-dense documents: Large, well-financed market of users that will pay for small advantages and efficiency improvements in workflows Heavy use of well-established jargon that can be easily machine-parsed a

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