Combing through legal documents can be a pain. General business contracts, policy documents, laws, you name it, they’re a pain. Lawyers in the crowd, you should rightly feel good about your skill with these arcane tools of modern society.
I’d like to make a simple system for speed-anotating legal documents to highlight the key points for ease of comprehension. As fully functional language-parsers are a little beyond the reach of current technology, we’ll have to make do with proxy measures.
Assuming that the allocation of funds correlates strongly with the important bits of a document, I propose designing a document-scanner that combs the legalese for mentions of numerical phrases — actual numerals, spelled-out-numbers and fractions and so forth. The regions of text near the numerical phrases would be checked for clear assignation descriptors that clarify who’s getting what.
Ideally, this would allow the program to build a list of important money flows and tag/highlight parts that aren’t easily machine-readable for later human inspection.
Perhaps armed with tools like this, citizen observers and newcomers to the business world can better scrutinize the bewildering maze of legal money matters.
