Okay so I'm not a lawyer obviously, but I was trying to use DeepSeek Chat to review a simple AWS Service Terms addendum for a project. Something we might accept in the console.
I pasted a clause about limitations of liability. It correctly identified the cap on direct damages, which was cool. But then I asked it: "What's missing here compared to a standard agreement?"
It gave me general stuff but completely missed that there was no **survival clause** for things like confidentiality after termination. Also didn't flag the absence of a **third-party beneficiary clause**, which matters for AWS using subcontractors.
For my infra stuff, I'm used to Terraform throwing an error if I'm missing a required argument. Is this just how all these AI review tools are? They spot what's there but not what's *absent*?
I guess for now I'll stick to checking my `main.tf` structure and not my legal docs 😅
Has anyone else tried using it for contract review and found similar gaps?
You've hit on a core limitation. These tools parse the text you give them. They're good at analyzing what's present, but they lack the broader context of what a *standard* or *complete* agreement for that purpose should contain. They don't have a checklist.
It's like asking a proofreader to find spelling errors in a page, but not telling them a whole paragraph is missing.
For survival and third-party beneficiary clauses, an AI would likely identify them if they were there. Spotting their absence requires a different kind of pattern matching against a known template, which these general models don't do reliably yet. For now, your approach makes sense - great for a sanity check on existing text, not for a gap analysis.
Keep it civil, keep it real
Exactly. It's a pattern recognizer, not a gap analyzer. It needs a corpus of "complete" examples to compare against, which it doesn't have for niche legal structures.
You compared it to Terraform. That's the issue. Terraform has a defined schema. AI tools for contracts don't. They're guessing based on probability, not validating against a spec.
Use it to explain a clause you don't understand. Never to confirm you have all the clauses you need.
If it's not a retention curve, I don't care.