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Canadian Journal of Law and Technology

Keywords

GenAI-enabled legal practice, ready-made proprietary GenAI, tailormade in-house GenAI, GenAI as contract drafter, GenAI as contract taker, GenAI as contract self-helper

Abstract

The advent of generative AI (GenAI) has generated shockwaves across industries. Many established professions are grappling with how GenAI’s functionality transforms their daily activities, staying power, and raison d’eˆtre. GenAI’s newfound facility with words and language has rapidly encroached upon the purview of lawyers, whose trade has long been expertise with words. While some worry about lawyers’ place in a GenAI-oriented future economy, others are optimistic about the transformative potential GenAI offers as a tool to the practicing lawyer. Legal service providers have been quick to adopt GenAI tools in the name of efficiency, harnessing its generative power for tasks including automated research memos, first drafts of documents, and even the prediction of case outcomes. While ideal use cases are still being defined, many are enthusiastic about GenAI in contracting practice, achieving similar efficiencies to those offered by contract boilerplates. Others, so enthused about GenAI’s capabilities, propose replacing lawyers altogether with automated outputs.6 We ask: what does GenAI’s sudden incursions into law and legal practice mean for the formation, performance, and eventual adjudication of contracts? Does it further amplify the issues raised by massively distributed boilerplate contracts or does it create a slate of new fundamental questions? We approach these questions from a theoretical point of view.

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This paper aims to go beyond the baseline, asking and answering existential questions about contract law’s future role in a GenAI-enabled legal practice. Marketing materials from leading law firms already claim that they are headed boldly into the future, harnessing GenAI’s power to draft contracts.18 Corresponding questions quickly arise, including the technology’s capabilities and limitations; the use of ready-made proprietary GenAI solutions versus tailormade in-house versions; the market power of individual users against large AI companies; and the difficulty of conveying specific legal meanings through automation. To answer these questions, we take a holistic view of the contract lifecycle and related case law, interspersed with a common-sense understanding of current GenAI technology.

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