Living Contracts: Beyond Document-Centric Interaction with Legal Agreements

Paper Title

Living Contracts: Beyond Document-Centric Interaction with Legal Agreements

Publication Info

• Topic area: Human-computer interaction (HCI) and legal interface design
• Keywords: Legal contracts, HCI, speculative design, interactive interfaces, leasing contracts, legal rights, contract lifecycle, design probes, user empowerment, proactive systems

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Legal contracts are often complex, ambiguous, and document-centric, limiting user engagement and understanding. Current systems fail to support users across the full lifecycle of contracts (before, during, and after signing).
• Significance: Contracts govern critical aspects of life, such as housing, employment, and insurance. Improving user interaction with contracts could enhance decision-making, reduce misunderstandings, and empower users to advocate for their rights.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research in HCI and legal studies has focused on improving contract readability through visual redesigns, summaries, or diagrams. However, these approaches remain document-centric and largely limited to the interpretation phase. Emerging AI capabilities for text transformation suggest potential for more interactive and proactive contract interfaces, but their application to high-stakes contracts remains unexplored.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Living Contracts—interactive, contextual, and proactive interfaces that support user engagement with contracts across their lifecycle (before, during, and after signing).
• Novelty:
  1. Reconceptualization of contracts as interactive interfaces rather than static documents.
  2. Design and implementation of three speculative probes (LeaseCompare, LeaseRead, LeaseTrack) to illustrate Living Contracts in the context of residential leases.
  3. Exploration of user challenges, opportunities, and risks through a qualitative study with 18 participants.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. LeaseCompare: Enables users to compare apartments by contractual clauses, providing composite scores for flexibility and protection.
  2. LeaseRead: Augments contract reading with Information Cards, Comic Scenarios, and Explorable Scenarios to contextualize and restructure legal text.
  3. LeaseTrack: Proactively reminds users of obligations and rights through features like an Obligation Tracker, Incident Tracker, and Contract-Aware Devices.
  4. Conducted a three-part qualitative study (semi-structured interviews, probe interactions, and design ideation) to evaluate user perceptions and extend the concepts beyond leases.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Participants faced barriers such as dense legalese, late access to contracts, and lack of awareness of legal rights.
  • Living Contracts features (e.g., contextualization, alternative representations, proactivity) were perceived as valuable for empowering users and aiding decision-making.
  • Participants valued features like Explorable Scenarios for simplifying dense text and Incident Trackers for advocating rights during disputes.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Living Contracts addressed challenges beyond document readability by supporting tasks across the contract lifecycle.
  • Proactive and interactive features enabled users to make more informed decisions and manage obligations effectively.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Study with 18 participants (landlords, tenants, legal professionals) using three design probes.
  • Methods included semi-structured interviews, probe interactions, and a design ideation session.
  • Participants highlighted opportunities for Living Contracts in other domains (e.g., insurance, loans, employment).
• Limitations and future work:
  • The study was exploratory and focused on U.S. contracts; findings may not generalize internationally.
  • Probes were speculative and not powered by real AI systems; future work could implement and evaluate these features in practice.
  • Further research is needed to address risks like misrepresentation of legal text and market barriers to adoption.

Summary

This paper introduces Living Contracts, a novel approach to reimagining legal contracts as interactive, contextual, and proactive interfaces. Using residential leases as a case study, the authors designed three speculative probes—LeaseCompare, LeaseRead, and LeaseTrack—to explore how users might engage with contracts before, during, and after signing. A qualitative study with 18 participants revealed significant barriers to contract engagement and highlighted the potential of Living Contracts to empower users through features like in-situ legal education, alternative representations, and proactive reminders. The study also identified opportunities to extend these concepts to other contract types, such as insurance and loans. While exploratory, this work opens a new design space for improving human-contract interaction.