> I want to take a step back and observe that you're saying expensive specialists will continue to be required if two parties want to make an agreement.

A lot of contract-lawyering involves getting ahead of when things go south and the two previously agreeing parties find themselves in disagreement.

The problem is those two people are in conflict not collaboration.

If the expensive person is still better at getting what _you_ want from a contract then it’s always worth doing that.

There’s a reason lawyers are so expensive to begin with - they do very complicated stuff with very expensive consequences if done badly.

Friction is inherent to a low-trust transaction. An agreement between two business entities is kind of the epitome of that.

Millions if not billions of agreements are made every day without the involvement of lawyers. Lawyers are only needed for particularly complex situations and even there they are generally only "needed" in the sense that parties feel they would add value.

In my experience, those expensive specialists help me protect against things me and the counterparty cannot even imagine when making an agreement. Do you mean that this would be fixed by AI or by making simpler agreements?

How?

Contract law has evolved because transfering the ownership of things is fraught with difficulty. Ownership as a concept itself is notoriously hard to define.

Consider housing - when you buy a house you own that land. Except if its an apartment, you just own the internal walls. Or when the government aquires your land through eminent domain. Or mineral rights - which don't belong to you, you just own the top 5 feet of topsoil. Or if you neglect a property and some squats in it. Or if you were given a fraudulent payment, and they take back the property.

Just getting people to agree is notoriously difficult when people have different often conflicting desires.