Towards Mitigating Perceived Unfairness in Contracts from a Non-Legal Stakeholder's Perspective
Commercial contracts are known to be a valuable source for deriving project-specific requirements. However, contract negotiations mainly occur among the legal counsel of the parties involved. The participation of non-legal stakeholders, including requirement analysts, engineers, and solution architects, whose primary responsibility lies in ensuring the seamless implementation of contractual terms, is often indirect and inadequate. Consequently, a significant number of sentences in contractual clauses, though legally accurate, can appear unfair from an implementation perspective to non-legal stakeholders. This perception poses a problem since requirements indicated in the clauses are obligatory and can involve punitive measures and penalties if not implemented as committed in the contract. Therefore, the identification of potentially unfair clauses in contracts becomes crucial. In this work, we conduct an empirical study to analyze the perspectives of different stakeholders regarding contractual fairness. We then investigate the ability of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to identify unfairness in contractual sentences by comparing chain of thought prompting and semi-supervised fine-tuning approaches. Using BERT-based fine-tuning, we achieved an accuracy of 84% on a dataset consisting of proprietary contracts. It outperformed chain of thought prompting using Vicuna-13B by a margin of 9%.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
FairnessSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Generating Clarification Questions for Disambiguating Contracts
Enterprises frequently enter into commercial contracts that can serve as vital sources of project-specific requirements. Contractual clauses are obligatory, and the requirements derived from contracts can detail the down…
Legal Compliance Evaluation of Smart Contracts Generated By Large Language Models
Smart contracts can implement and automate parts of legal contracts, but ensuring their legal compliance remains challenging. Existing approaches such as formal specification, verification, and model-based development re…
Code GenerationImproving Fairness in Criminal Justice Algorithmic Risk Assessments Using Conformal Prediction Sets
Risk assessment algorithms have been correctly criticized for potential unfairness, and there is an active cottage industry trying to make repairs. In this paper, we adopt a framework from conformal prediction sets to re…
Conformal PredictionFairnessvalidLAW: Legal Agentic Workflows for Custody and Fund Services Contracts
Legal contracts in the custody and fund services domain govern critical aspects such as key provider responsibilities, fee schedules, and indemnification rights. However, it is challenging for an off-the-shelf Large Lang…
Language ModelingLanguage ModellingLarge Language ModelAn Open Source Contractual Language Understanding Application Using Machine Learning
Legal field is characterized by its exclusivity and non-transparency. Despite the frequency and relevance of legal dealings, legal documents like contracts remains elusive to non-legal professionals for the copious usage…
Document Text ClassificationInformation RetrievalOptical Character Recognition (OCR)Question Answering