TermSight: Making Service Contracts Approachable

Legal contracts govern much of our society, but their specialized language is difficult for non-experts to read. While AI has enabled simplification of complex language, legal contracts pose unique challenges because of their connection to readers’ values, ambiguity, and legally binding nature. Based on a formative study (N=20) using Terms of Service (ToS) as example contracts to study challenges in contract reading, we developed TermSight, an intelligent reading interface to probe the opportunities and challenges of designing augmentations for legal text. TermSight guides readers to relevant clauses with color-coded plain-language snippets of information and contextualizes ambiguous language with definitions and hypothetical scenarios. Importantly, TermSight’s features always foreground the original, legally-binding contract text (e.g., linking to associated clauses). Our within-subjects study (N=20) demonstrated the opportunities of TermSight in making ToS significantly easier to read and navigate while revealing the challenges of augmenting service contracts such as ToS.