Legal advice from Copilot?

I happen to publish a book. Thanks to AI community of which I'm a part of manager group. As AI hype is going high, the publisher asked few topics on AI. I wrote a book about AI and chemistry. It's in Korean,,, so its accessibility is a bit limited becaues of language barrier. Hope that I may have a chance to translate the book into other languages.

 

Anyway a publisher offered a deal for the publication, and I decided to write a book. When I received the contract paper from the publisher after sending the book outline, I had many thoughts. I've never signed a contract like this before in my life, and I wondered if I was signing a losing contract, and I thought, 'Can I trust this publisher?' When I do something for the first time, I doubt things that I don't need to worry because I am inexperienced. Still I want to make a decision after I was convinced, and I decided to use copilot to understand the contract.

 

First of all, I wanted to check the financial status of the publisher. My first question to the co-pilot was the publisher's financial statement. Unfortunately, there were no publicly available information on that. I changed the question to ask about market size of the publishing industry and finantial statements of the top companies. Based on the copilot's answer, I was able to get a glimpse of publishing industry.

 

Second, I checked the revenue structure of the publisher's contract. I wrote a prompt on the terms of the contract and asked if it was common for publishers to have revenue agreements like this. I was able to find a few other examples of contracts that had similar terms to mine. I realized that since I'm a first-time author, a similar deal would be a good deal for me. I had a lot of doubts in my mind because it was my first time, but after this confirmation, I felt at ease.

 

Finally, I wanted to review a contract, which was delivered to me as a pdf file, so I opened the contract file in Microsoft Edge and set it to 'search only within the document'. If you just use copilot with default option, it will search the entire web.

Button to adjust search scope

In the image above, you can limit the search scope by selecting the red-boxed option. All the tabs in Microsoft Edge will be shown in the option, and you just need to select the tab you want to extract information.

 

Tabs opened in the Edge

In this example, I have a contract pdf file open in Microsoft Edge and typed the following prompt
Prompt: What should I focus on in this contract to protect my revenue?
The answer was that I should look for clauses about revenue sharing, contract duration, and mutual responsibility. The search also showed me which clauses in the contract are related with those. so I read them carefully, and if I didn't understand a legal term in the clause, I asked copilot about the meaning of the term.

 

Thanks to copilot, I was able to take the offer with certainty. I'm not saying we don't need a lawyer anymore. We need to meet a lawyer for more important legal advice, but even so, understanding my problem and describing them with legal terms helps lawyers understand my situation better; therefore, legal service quality can be improved as well. Copilot can be your loyal assistant to do the task you are not familiar with!