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Computer DraftingYes, at Exari where I work we have been helping corporations and law firms automate contract drafting since 2000. This is also known as "document assembly".At this point, there is still invariably some human input required, to set up the underlying template and then to (1) initiate the process for an external system to pass in the information required in the contract and/or (2) provide the information required by completing a browser-based interview questionnaire.We tend to view this in the context of a document spectrum encompassing 3 categories - low complexity, medium complexity and high complexity.Low ComplexityIf all you ever need to do is some kind of mail merge or field substitution, where you feed in some names, addresses, products or prices, then you are dealing with low complexity automation. This is the home turf of "customer communications management", which, for the most part, means mass-mailing thousands of letters to thousands of customers, and making sure it says "Dear Bob" or "Dear Betty" at the top (this personal touch making Bob and Betty feel all warm and fuzzy). The documents might have some picky layout or branding, but the content is largely standardized and the variations are limited and controlled.Medium ComplexityAs you move from consumer (B2C) to business (B2B) transactions, where contracts are negotiated and paperwork is much less standard, you enter the world of medium complexity automation. In order to handle negotiated fall‐back language in contracts, you need to support conditional logic, auto-numbering, dynamic cross-references, and page layouts that work no matter what combination of clauses ends up in the final draft. You also encounter repeating arrays of data, which is a fancy way of saying that lists of names, prices or products might need to contain 1, 2, 3 or 30 items. And because real people need to tailor each document to reflect the deals they negotiate, you have the added complexity of designing an intuitive, interactive, wizard (rather than simply pressing a button to run a batch process).High ComplexityThe final frontier is high complexity automation. You may need to assemble not one, but 20 different documents, or subset of those 20 documents, all from a single questionnaire, without ever asking a redundant question.You may need to handle deeply nested conditional logic, where you include some special compliance-related clauses only if you are selling pink widgets, manufactured in Shenzhen, sold by your US operating subsidiary, and bundled with consulting services in Hong Kong. You may need to generate documents that list repeating data (for example, a description of all the property you own and the value of each item), within other lists of repeating data (for example, all the locations where you do business). Or you may need to automate a set of documents that sometimes has two parties (a lender and a borrower) and sometimes has many different parties (4 lenders, 2 borrowers, and 3 guarantors). By the way, our founder, Jamie, has offered a prize for anyone who comes up with a cool‐sounding collective noun that covers borrowers and guarantors as a single class.FormalizingThe other part to this question relates to the formalizing of contracts, which could be interpreted as the adoption of industry-standard forms. This can certainly help the drafting process (computer or human) and I think we can see this in examples such as the Australian Standards building contracts and ISDA Master Agreements.We have also engaged with legal industry bodies such as the Australian Corporate Lawyers Association and Hong Kong Corporate Counsel Association to explore standardized and automated Non-disclosure Agreements and liability/indemnity clauses that their members can adopt to this end.Perhaps one day, if we are all using standardized forms with pre-approved alternatives, the entire drafting, negotiation and execution process can be completed autonomously by computers.