Automated Consistency Analysis for Legal Contracts

Alan Khoja, Martin Kölbl, Stefan Leue, Rüdiger Wilhelmi

Abstract: Contracts in business life, and in particular company purchase agreements, often comprise a large number of provisions and are correspondingly long and complex. In practice, it is therefore a great challenge to keep track of their regulatory context and to identify and avoid inconsistencies in such contracts. Against this background, we propose a semi-formal as well as a formal logical modeling of this type of contracts, using decidable first-order theories. We also present the tool ContractCheck, which performs fully automated inconsistency analyses on the considered contracts using Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solving.