Ask HN: Whats your best workflows to draft legal agreements without lawyers?
6 philippb 13 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.
A growing number of actual practicing lawyers have got themselves into serious legal trouble by using AI to draft legal documents. You are not going to do better than them; you are going to do worse.
If it's something important, hire a lawyer (expensive) or buy a pre-written legal document that has already been written by a lawyer (cheap).
If it's something unimportant then just agree everything in email and that will be legitimate evidence if you ever need to go to court - and going to court should be your last resort anyway.
Whatever it is, "saving money" by writing a legal document yourself with or without the "help" of AI is a terrible terrible idea.
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.
Do you have an exit criteria that you can define for when the models stop picking on the other models solutions?
> I just got an insane bill from a lawyer for drafting an agreement.
If you feel you were overcharged, find a lawyer who has more reasonable rates. They're out there. For simple contracts, you could even make use of low cost legal aid outfits.
We lawyers have a saying: pay me now or pay me later.
Trying to handle your own legal affairs without a lawyer is a recipe for disaster. (Analogizing for the HN crowd: it's a bit like thinking you can invent your own cryptography library for essential software.) Even lawyers need lawyers! ("A lawyer who represents himself has an idiot for a client.")
I will look forward to the prospect of handling the inevitable litigation that arises from those of you drafting your own agreements — and, better yet, your appeals after you still don't learn your lesson and then try to represent yourselves in court too.
If it's important enough to put in writing, it's important enough to rely on competent legal counsel.
The bigger the bill, the more dollars are in your 30% markup when you pass your costs to the client.
(2) Ask Nolo Press