 Right? And these are your other options. So if you don't want to listen to this talk, you can go to a different one. Just want to make sure everybody's in the right place. Okay. Whoops. Well, that's not going to work. Right. So this is legalese. And I want to begin with the observation that we humans may not be the only animal to use language. We may not be the only animal to use tools because lots of other animals use language, lots of other animals use tools, but we are the only animal to use language as a tool, which is pretty cool. Right? And so if you think about the most evolved human animals who use language as a tool, we get poets, we get philosophers. And I feel pretty good about being in that company. Right? These are pretty awesome things. And then I realized that there's also another kind of animal that uses language as a tool, and that's lawyers. Is there anybody in the room who is a lawyer? No? No. All right. Well, I'll just, you can stand up and shout objection at any point if you want. But I'll just pick on the lawyers. Lawyers are sort of like the lost tribe of programmers. They've been wandering in the desert for hundreds of years looking for people that they can build by the hour. Right? But it's actually not their fault. They're dealing with this massive legacy code base of hundreds of years of legislation and cases and so on. And they're using tools that are like 20 years out of date. This is an actual email that I got. It was one of those emails where the content of the email was actually in a Word document that was attached to the email. Right? Because lawyers do that. And I had sent them this thing to look at and they sent me their feedback. And their feedback was like, here's a table with 83 items in it that just says, we think you should change this. Can you change it? And I was like, wow, you guys, your tools suck because as a programmer, I'm expecting something more like this, right? Like send me your pull request, send me your diffs. So I started looking into how legislation is written. I looked at how contracts are written. And if you look at, like here's just a random passage that I picked out. Every time I read a passage like this, I get this itch. I get this urge to open up my text editor and start editing. I want to add indentation. I want to add curly braces. And so let's actually do that. You can do that. First, let's change the color to green on black. And then you rewrite this. And then it makes so much more sense. And this is kind of the inspiration. I think my background is computer science. I'm a programmer. But for the last four years, I've worked for a company that has made a large number of startup investments. And over the course of making these investments, you know, it's nice to do this writing checks and so on. But behind every big check that you see is a huge pile of paperwork. It's like 10 agreements you have to do, like shareholder agreements, founder agreements, ESOPs, employment agreements, you have to do director's resolutions, members' resolutions, all this stuff that goes into being able to write this check. And now I'm at that point where like every two weeks there is a startup that comes to me and says, hey, we're doing a fundraising. Can you help us send us a template for a term sheet? Can you give us some of the paperwork that we need to make this happen? And my response is usually, you know, it's not that easy. Like we need to customize that template for you. And then I realized that actually a lot of these startups were coming to me after first going to a lawyer. And the lawyer was like, yeah, we can do all this stuff for you. It'll be $10,000. And the startup says, we don't want to pay $10,000. Let's go talk to Meng because he's a sucker. So we're kind of in that situation where software was like 20 years ago. If you wanted a shopping cart, it would be $10,000, right? But we've moved on from that. And law has not. So as a computer scientist, right, if you were Mark Andreessen, you would say software is eating the world. And I would say, okay, it's time for software to eat law. And so I had a conversation with Mark Andreessen about this. And I was like, I was complaining about like, why isn't there some sort of like automated thing that I can download that will take care of investment agreements? And Mark Andreessen, who is one of the most prolific and well known investors in the world, he's like, yeah, I have that pain point too. And I'm looking to invest in someone who can solve that. So I was like, all right, well, that sounds good. So maybe I should go do something like this. And, you know, it's kind of a miracle. I don't know why this hasn't been done yet because startup founders were all technical. Our default instinct when we are faced with a problem is not Oh, let me go hire a lawyer for 500 bucks an hour and talk to the lawyer about this problem. It's I want to go download some software, right? So imagine if you could download a software package and tell it I've got a Singapore startup. This is the UEN. Go use the biz file API and just pull down on the rest of it. I want to do a funding round on a 2.5 million pre money valuation. I'm going to raise half a million using a security, right? That's a convertible note. With a 20% discount and a 1x LP, right? You just put this into the config. I've got two investors coming in, Alice and Bob. And I want to be able to just produce the documents that I need just from this. And that's how it should be, right? And sometimes, you know, so after you produce that, you want to be able to send it to Echo sign. And that's that's actually live right now. You can do that with the system. And sometimes what happens is you send out the document in Echo sign and the other side actually reads it and they're like, Oh, you know, we don't want to use a convertible note. We would prefer to use this thing called a safe. Now, if you got that back, and if you're dealing with a lawyer, you would go to your lawyer and you'd say, You know, I know I just paid you to do $2,000 worth of work. We need to throw that away and we need to do another 2000 on the safe. And the lawyer be like, no problem. It will take another two weeks. So in this system, you just go and change that, right? And then you would recompile and then you would get your safe. And then if you want to change from a safe to a series seed, you would change that and then you would recompile and then you would get a series seed. So this is how, you know, we can automate a lot of what happens in law. So let me run through a real life case study. This is something that actually happened two weeks ago. So we've been eating our own dog food. And we flew a bunch of people to Singapore to attend FOSAsia. And we immediately came into this problem where how do you do expense reimbursement for airfare, right? This is a classic. Now we have a company. Now we have to worry about reimbursements. Now because we are an early adopter, embracer of FinTech, we don't have a bank account. And if you don't have a bank account, how do you pay someone? So you do reimbursements like you add another layer of indirection. Anuj bought a plane ticket and I paid Anuj and now the company has to pay me. And by the way, I paid Anuj using Bitcoin because I'm cool. So the problem is the company is not going to be able to pay me Bitcoin, right? Instead, the company could pay me in the form of debt. The company issues me debt and says the company owes me this much and one day either I will get paid back the money or I will get stock in the company. And this is called a convertible note. This is a standard investment instrument. Usually you would use it for like 100,000 to a million dollar financing. And here I'm using it for one Bitcoin. Because I can, right? Because legal lease has reduced the friction so much that it produces all the paperwork that's needed to do the round. It actually does the round. All I have to do is sign it. And it took me 10 minutes. Start to finish. In fact, there was one time when we had to do two airfares. And so we did two rounds on the same day. And this is not something that you can usually do, right? Usually a convertible note financing takes months. You do it for like half a million dollars. And here we are being able to do this with practically no friction. So the bigger idea is that if you look at a contract, a contract actually looks a lot like a program. Except lawyers don't really know this, right? When I read a contract, there's a like there's a paragraph that says, in the event, there is a next round fundraising, right? Or in the event, this happens or that happens. I read that as like, oh, what you've got there is an event driven, reactive callback, right? But they don't think it that way. So I think it's possible to turn a lot of legal concepts into programming concepts. We can show them how to use Git. We can show them how to, how to do all these things that we take for granted. And they're still stuck in like using WordPerfect. So one of the other things that you could do with this is you could say, it's not just a template, right? Filling in a template is kind of easy. But if you start expressing more complex ideas in code, then you can build a compiler that will compile your legal contract into English. And this is called the isomorphism challenge. We want to be able to have a formal version on the left and an English version on the right. You want to be able to compile from this to that and you want to be able to parse from that to this. So that would be a really nice challenge. We're working on that today. And once you can do that, here's something that you can't do with an English contract, right? Imagine you write your contract in this programming language. And then you try to compile it. And the compiler tells you, sorry, you can't do that because if you did that, you would be breaking the law. So these are just two examples of like clause 3.1 says that this is going to happen. And then clause 3.2 or clause 6.2 says that's going to happen. These two things can't both happen. You have a bug. Or further down, it'll say like the company's act specifies that you have to do this. But your workflow doesn't say you do that. So don't do that. Right? You have a bug. So this is the sort of thing that if there are any lawyers in the room, I think we'd make them quake in fear. But they're too busy billing clients right now. So they're not going to do that. But this is the world that we live in, right? We've got Watson has gone to med school and has learned medicine. We live in a world where cars can drive themselves, where go can beat the best human player, right? And so bringing AI to law is just going to be a simple matter of programming. But this is not just the sort of thing where you can sit down and start hacking out a website, right? There's actually about 30 years of fairly sophisticated research in computational linguistics, formal methods, legal formalization. This is actually from somebody else's paper, but you've heard of the lambda calculus. There's also the deontic calculus, the modal calculus. These ideas all come into play. So I've got four major challenges that we're dealing with right now. One is to design and implement the domain specific language that will allow us to represent contracts. And if you can say that a person, right? If a person knows that something's going to happen, then at this time, they must do something. So this is the sort of thing that we need help with. We want to build the compiler that will do model checking and formal verification. We want to write the natural language generator that will produce output in English, but not just English, right? Imagine being able to have Bahasa and Thai and Vietnamese contracts that are all provably identical. And we want to output this stuff to Ethereum because if you can express all this stuff, then we can just say, okay, well, when this happens, let that happen, you know, I don't need to sign anything. Please stop asking me to sign things on paper and then scan it to you. I just give my approval once and Ethereum takes care of the rest. So we want to be able to compile to smart contracts. So why am I talking about this at Fawcasia? This is an open source project. It's actually more than one open source project because the language is going to be open. The compiler is going to be open. The contracts that are written in this language should be open. They're going to be licensed under Creative Commons or actually maybe I think they're going to be licensed under like GPL or MIT. I actually don't know because the content is code and the code is content. So you tell me which is appropriate. But the idea is that the way programmers work and the way we think is like superior to the way lawyers work and the way lawyers think. So if we can if we can bring the same dynamics that we're used to an open source to the world of law then we can obsolete this entire profession really because they're like a team of programmers paid by the hour to reinvent the wheel. I think we have ideas about how that's that could be improved. So where is this going? It's possible that in the future there will be a sort of GitHub for legal contracts. The next time you need to get something done like your startup needs to get funded or you need to hire an employee or give them an ESOP or even like a freelance service contract instead of going to a lawyer you just download something. So these are the four challenges that I've got right now. If you would like to help out, we have a mailing list and a website. You can also contact me on Twitter and I'll be around for the weekend. You can also look for people wearing legalese t-shirts. So that's it. I don't know how much time I have. We could do questions or... You could do questions. We have about five minutes. Five minutes. Okay. Anybody want to say anything? Yeah, in the back. So you're hinting that you actually have a startup for doing this, right? Yeah. So if you're making this as open source and it's been given away for you, what is your way of making money from this considering what you're doing is basically putting a gun in the head of the entire legal industry? Yeah. So a number of law firms have actually volunteered to help. They said, we want to contribute templates to the system. We want to help you guys make this happen. And I said, why would you want to do that? And they said, well, we want to be on the right side of this disruption. We see that the disruption is going to happen. But there's going to be a substantial number of people out there who will, even at the end of this whole process, they will want to get some law firm to bless what has occurred, right? Because clients don't feel secure unless they've paid money to be told that everything's going to be okay, right? And the law firms that are sort of forward-looking, I said, look, if we're the law firms that contribute all of the templates and the libraries, then those clients are going to come to us. So that's one way of answering the question. Another way is, you know, like MySQL was worth a billion dollars, right? So just because your open source doesn't mean you're not going to be able to make money or be worth something, like OpenTable right now, their approach to making money is we're just going to charge a dollar for every reservation. But they don't care if it's like a fancy restaurant or a cheap restaurant, it's just one dollar per reservation and that's it. So maybe we could charge one dollar per signature. And if everybody in the world is using this, that's okay, right? That's enough money. In fact, there's one very specific revenue source that we just found, which is once you've generated all the PDFs and you send them to the other side and the other side sends you comments at that point, you're like, oh, I need to edit this. Can I get this in Microsoft Word format? And we're like, no, don't edit this in Microsoft Word format. Go to GitHub, fork the repository, send us a pull request. But if you're not able to do that, then we'll sell you the Word doc for like a dollar a page. So that could make money too, right? There's actually like a whole list of ways that we've thought about making money. And we will try them all, I hope. Yes. Actually three questions are three issues with the hosting that I have. First is the portion of liability. Yes. Second is the reason we buy insurance is not because we expect to die every day, just that in case that happens. So the reason you go to a doctor is the same, it's not because you think you have a common cold and you continue because there's something else wrong. That's the reason you go to a lawyer also. Piece of mind. That's right. And the third is the issue with software than there's above. Then it means that fun is affected. If you're talking about GitHub for 100x and 100 as a loophole, everyone is affected. And then you can expect everybody to forget the issues that I see from there. That's right. Piece of mind can only come when you use commercial software built custom for you. Liability. Nobody got fired for buying IBM. Liability. No, liability is one reason. There's a people aspect, right? You're not working to do the best you can. Nobody got fired for hiring IBM. Because you say I did the best I could. People will do people. You're not going to change that. That's true. So I think there are certain domains of law where, yes, actually you do want lawyers. Like if there's litigation, if there's criminal law, then we're quite happy for humans to do that stuff. But for really procedural stuff that's just like conveyancing or investment agreements where it's the same thing each time. Then I think the liability is reduced by the fact that it's just the same thing as last time. But you're right. People are always going to be concerned about that and there's always going to be a market for the sprinkling of holy water that only a licensed law firm can do. Some people just won't care though. Some people are happy to pirate their software. Yeah. If you look at law and like jurisdictions where the larger part of contract work is actually in a confided law, how does that fit together? Lawmakers can more or less pull the rug under your feet by changing the law and suddenly algorithms. That's a fantastic opportunity. In the past people would sign their contracts and that would be it. They would go and sit on the shelf. And if the law changes, like suppose gay marriage is now legal, then there's all these existing contracts that talk about husband and wife that now need a service pack. And we could send out the yearly service pack that updates all of your contracts and we could make money that way. It works for Microsoft. Actually, that is, sorry, just a comment. That's actually a very good point because in case some people don't know, but Thailand is getting an entirely new constitution again. And there is a lot of this problem. That's the, I upgraded my kernel and now I have to recompile everything problem. Basically, lots of people are not realizing the implications of what the services and law and things that they're used to that have suddenly become obsolete, illegal under the new framework. If you guys haven't seen this already, I want to strongly recommend you check out this piece on the Y2 gay problem. The database engineering perspective on gay marriage, you should check this out. It's fantastic. Okay, last comment. Are we out of time? Okay, two more. Yes. I was thinking, do you ever refactor your code in the sense that one reason I never suggest the GPL to people because it's so complicated, who's aware that, who understands that MIT is the way to go. So I'm thinking with your legal documents, there's a real risk of complexity just growing out of control, you know. So do you ever like have an opportunity to refactor and actually make a contract that's the same as the MLT license? Yeah, we would like to keep things as simple as possible. There are actually books about how to, there's a manual of style for how to write a good contract. And we will be following those kinds of standards and guides as we do what we do. But yeah, it makes a lot of sense to refactor a contract to make it make more sense. Sometimes you read contracts where these lawyers must be getting paid by the word because they've unrolled every loop and they've repeated every definition. It's like they haven't heard of variables and they haven't heard of functions. So refactoring would help in those kinds of situations. There's a whole book about this, like how to do it, right? Yeah, last question. What's the relationship to large ban? To what? Large ban. Yeah, you know, like, so large ban is an invented language. Sorry, there it is. And this is one example of how you can formalize natural language for the sake of improving communication, reducing ambiguity. I don't speak this myself, but it might be possible for us to output our code into a language like this or into some other controlled natural language like Attempto, for example. This is a formal language that is readable as English. So this could be one output target for us and then we run an optimizer and then it turns into something that's that a lawyer can read. Okay, so that's it. Our out of time. Justin. Thank you very much.