Ask HN: Whats your best workflows to draft legal agreements without lawyers?

4 philippb 9 7/29/2025, 10:42:47 PM
I just got an insane bill from a lawyer for drafting an agreement. I was wondering if some of you have a great workflow for drafting legal agreements with AI that are good enough to have a lawyer just review it? My background is CS, so it's hard judge myself and I feel ChatGPT doesn't give enough details.

Comments (9)

jus3sixty · 10h ago
I have handled a few personal legal matters myself by drafting with Lex.page (a very useful tool for any writing but you can also accomplish about the same thing with Google Docs and Gemini.)

It’s also important to perfectly prompt the “AI” promptly to perfection. You have to tell it who it is, what it is doing and make sure to be specific about the scope and legal matters involved.

Break it down into smaller chunks and once you have a draft you like, send the draft to another “AI” and ask it to play as a lawyer on the other side of your equation and “rip apart” the draft letter you wrote like any good lawyer would.

Make your two “AI” models adversarial to each other until the final result is a rock solid document.

philippb · 7h ago
thanks for the tip with two AI models. I've done that in writing coding specs. I already gave it a lot of detail about who it is. will give this a try.

Do you have an exit criteria that you can define for when the models stop picking on the other models solutions?

bix6 · 10h ago
What type of agreement? You can sometimes find an example agreement online, modify it to your needs, then have a lawyer give it a final review.
philippb · 7h ago
this case was a little bit of a one off. Created a convertible note for a piece of land that doesn't exist yet.
brudgers · 10h ago
I just got an insane bill from a lawyer

The bigger the bill, the more dollars are in your 30% markup when you pass your costs to the client.

philippb · 7h ago
It was for something personal... so I'm just having my bill for breakfast
PaulHoule · 11h ago
Got to the public library and check out some books from Nolo Press.
tacostakohashi · 10h ago
What's the workflow for going to the library though, and how goes ChatGPT integrate with it? Is there an MCP for Nolo Press?
PaulHoule · 9h ago
(1) Get in my car, drive to the library, pay $1 an hour to park, find a contract in the book, type it in, edit, done

(2) Ask Nolo Press