Adobe Says Acrobat Can Simplify Complex Legal Contracts for You

Adobe, which loves to shove long-term subscriptions onto its customers, has a new add-on for Acrobat that it says will make it easier to read and understand legal contracts. Acrobat AI Assistant, as it is called, is supposed to look at a PDF contract and extract the most important details, as well as simplify them in a way that regular people can understand.

The new feature is built into Adobe’s Acrobat PDF reader, and serves as a $4.99 per month add-on for both free and paid tiers of the app. You can probably expect that Adobe is going to push the feature hard on users as it has reoriented its whole business around recurring subscriptions.

Adobe says that recent surveys found 70 percent of consumers admit to signing contracts without knowing all of the terms within them. That suggests 30 percent of people actually read through contracts in their entirety, which seems generous. Either way, Adobe says that Acrobat AI Assistant can save users time by surfacing key terms with citations, and recommend questions a user might ask the assistant in order to fully understand what they are signing.

Of course, AI language models are not perfect—they are next-word predictors that try and produce text that looks like a factual synthesis of the information they are provided; they do not inherently try and produce a factual synthesis. That could be good enough some of the time, but in the case of legal contracts it opens up users to risk if they sign a contract claiming they understood it when in fact they had not actually read it in its entirety. Generally, pleading ignorance because you did not read it does not make a contract invalid.

That being said, because most people do not read contracts anyway, it seems like somewhat of a moot point.

Major companies like to fill their user agreements with complex language that will protect them from liability. Last year, Disney faced a PR crisis when a man whose wife died after eating at a restaurant in Disney World was told he could not sue the company because he had signed a user agreement for Disney+ that required disputes with the company go to private arbitration. Perhaps a tool like Acrobat AI Assistant could at least surface details like that and explain them so individuals understand what they are signing up for.

Adobe has lost a lot of fans over the years due to its move to a subscription model for apps like Photoshop, as well as its use of dark patterns to keep customers locked in by charging them penalties if they try and cancel annual subscriptions early. Tech companies prefer subscription models over one-time purchases because they create recurring, predictable revenue streams. Photoshop being the industry standard in the design world, it has been hard to unseat Adobe from its position of dominance.