The New Deals: How Contracts Were, Are, and Will Be Written Without Lawyers

About the talk: 

This talk examines how contracts in the digital age are increasingly written without lawyers. Although templates and boilerplate terms have been circulating for decades, if not centuries, the Internet has given rise to two particularly salient new intermediaries of legal drafting: contract generators and digital platforms. Drawing on large-scale analyses of privacy policies and app licenses, the talk outlines how these infrastructures influence contractual content, standardisation, and legal compliance online. Methodologically, the project combines natural language processing, statistical analysis, and LLM-based methods to study contracts at scale across different legal settings. The talk concludes by considering AI as a possible next step in lawyer-less contracting and the wider legal and societal implications of delegating contractual production to technological systems.

Bio: Luka Nenadic is a PhD. Student at ETH Zurich (Center for Law & Economics). His research examines how technology is reshaping the creation process of legal documents. He investigates the shift in rule-making power from states to private intermediaries, focusing on the role of platforms in app ecosystems, the strategic international implementation of EU regulations (“Brussels Effect”), as well as the prevalence and efficacy of automated contract generators. To enable this empirical analysis, he developed longitudinal datasets of legal documents and multilingual benchmarks for evaluating Large Language Models in legal contexts.

Participate online: https://teams.live.com/meet/9360896401477?p=vq2JzOX3JMNquCEryL

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