Drafting terms and conditions with AI: what should you consider?
Terms and conditions within minutes
With AI, you can have terms and conditions drafted within minutes. You describe what your business does, enter a number of instructions, and receive an extensive legal-looking document almost immediately.
That may seem like a quick and inexpensive solution. But terms that sound legal are not automatically legally sound terms.
Terms and conditions must fit your business
Good terms and conditions align with your services, working methods, and risks.
Do you supply products or services? Do you work with subscriptions? Do you engage third parties? What obligations does your customer have? When can an agreement be terminated? And which liabilities can you limit?
The answers to questions like these determine which provisions are needed and how they should be structured legally.
AI can generate provisions on these subjects. You must then still be able to assess whether they are legally correct, consistent with one another, and appropriate for your business.
Sounding legal does not mean being legally correct
In practice, I see that terms and conditions drafted with the help of AI can appear extensive and legal at first glance, but still contain important shortcomings when reviewed substantively.
Liability may not be regulated appropriately, provisions may be included that are not legally permitted or do not have the intended effect, and the terms often contain unnecessary repetition.
The same subjects sometimes appear in several places and are phrased slightly differently each time. This not only makes the terms unnecessarily long, but can also create uncertainty about what the parties have actually agreed.
You cannot see what is missing
Another risk is less visible. As an entrepreneur, you do not always know which legal subjects need to be covered in your terms and conditions.
The document may contain an extensive liability clause while omitting a provision that is important for your services. Or it may contain standard provisions that do not fit the way you actually work.
Precisely the provisions that are missing can prove important in practice.
More text does not mean more protection
More extensive terms and conditions do not automatically provide more legal protection.
Repetition, contradictory provisions, and unnecessarily complex wording can instead create uncertainty. Good terms and conditions form one coherent whole in which every provision has a clear purpose.
Does that mean AI cannot be used at all?
AI can certainly be a useful tool for preparing a first draft, structuring subjects, or formulating text.
With terms and conditions, however, the main legal value does not lie only in writing the text. It lies above all in determining which risks are relevant, what is and is not legally possible, and how those matters should be recorded properly.
Have your terms and conditions reviewed
Have you drafted your own terms and conditions, for example with the help of AI or an online template? It is sensible to have them reviewed to determine whether they are legally correct and genuinely fit your business.
At Legal Comfort, I draft terms and conditions and review existing terms. I consider the legal content, the coherence between the provisions, and the specific working methods and risks of your business.
Have you drafted terms and conditions with AI, or would you like to know whether your current terms are legally in order? Please get in touch for a no-obligation discussion about legal advice.