Modelling Legal Contracts as Processes

TL;DR

This paper proposes a process-based model for representing legal contracts, capturing their evolution over time to assist in drafting and performance monitoring by analyzing obligations and agreement states.

Contribution

It introduces an informal notation to summarize contract states and determine legal positions based on event sequences, enhancing understanding of contractual evolution.

Findings

A new process-oriented representation of contracts

Effective for contract drafting and performance monitoring

Illustrated with typical obligation patterns

Abstract

This paper concentrates on the representation of the legal relations that obtain between parties once they have entered a contractual agreement and their evolution as the agreement progresses through time. Contracts are regarded as process and they are analysed in terms of the obligations that are active at various points during their life span. An informal notation is introduced that summarizes conveniently the states of an agreement as it evolves over time. Such a representation enables us to determine what the status of an agreement is, given an event or a sequence of events that concern the performance of actions by the agents involved. This is useful both in the context of contract drafting (where parties might wish to preview how their agreement might evolve) and in the context of contract performance monitoring (where parties might with to establish what their legal positions are once their agreement is in force). The discussion is based on an example that illustrates some typical patterns of contractual obligations.