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Contract Catch: A new app checks contract language

RICHARD WEINER
Technology for Lawyers

Published: November 11, 2016

A long time ago, in a city far, far away, before I went to law school, I worked as a proofreader at the Wall Street law firm Reid & Priest. There were four of us in a little office going over what was, at the time, the emergent word processing technology as it was being applied to legal documents. (This was 1978-79, so I’ve been looking at this stuff a long time).

It looks like a new app, Contract Catch (https://contractcatch.com), is looking to put proofreaders out of business, if there are any left.

Contract Catch, whose software is patent pending, was developed by Ross Guberman, president of Legal Writing Pro LLC. A graduate of Yale, the Sorbonne and the University of Chicago School of Law, Guberman travels the world giving effective language seminars to attorneys.

Contract Catch allows a user to simply upload a contract of virtually “any length” and then it goes to work, as the website says, applying “hundreds of proprietary rules” to the document, flagging possible errors, inconsistencies, “troublesome language,” everything from “issues to defined terms to the questionable drafting of rights and obligations.”

Various fields in the app can be used to perform different kinds of document reviews called “rule set options,” including “substantive,” “errors and inconsistencies,” “plain English” or any combination of the three.

The results are immediate with numerous highlighted words and phrases that, in the words of one reviewer, may make you think that you don’t know how to write at all.

Any suggested change can be used or discarded. A change can be globalized throughout the document. There are also “ignore” and “ignore all” options, if all the highlights get annoying.

The flagged changes will often be in the category of “archaic” language, as Contract Catch is an adherent of the “plain English” school of legal writing (as am I).

Contract Catch flags rules violations like undefined terms, or capitalization mistakes.

Definitely worth checking out, especially with a free trial period.

Contract Catch has a seven-day free trail. After that, it costs about $300 a year.


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