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How Small Businesses Transform PDF Agreements into Action

Published: 14 October 2023 Publication History

Abstract

A legal agreement is a type of procedural document that describes the steps that parties must take to fulfill legal obligations. Following these steps requires human interpretation, which is often inefficient and error prone. For a Small to Medium Sized Business (SMB), this process is laborious. We conduct an interview study to understand how information in PDF agreements is currently understood, processed, and acted upon by SMB employees working in small teams of non-domain experts. Through qualitative analysis and a text highlighting activity, we observe knowledge transfer workflows in SMBs and propose design principles for using AI-extracted information to create actionable documents that address gaps in efficiency, understanding, and agency.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '23 Companion: Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
October 2023
596 pages
ISBN:9798400701290
DOI:10.1145/3584931
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 14 October 2023

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Author Tags

  1. PDF
  2. actionable documents
  3. agreement visualization
  4. extraction
  5. small business

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