We're Open-Sourcing Find The Fuck Up
Today, we're open-sourcing and releasing a simple LLM-based app that flags obvious mistakes your lawyers made while drafting your contracts. In our many years in legal tech and practice, we've seen countless, embarrassing mistakes made by lawyers. Most of the time these mistakes are not consequential, like simple typos. But occasionally they can be career-ending (like putting a decimal point in the wrong place). Our tool flags simple errors for you and lets you do a basic check on the work product from your lawyer.
We think non-lawyers will be very surprised at how common errors are, even in documents that cost you tens of thousands to draft.
Hold on to your pearls for a moment. Our tool is called Find The Fuck Up. When you see the kinds of mistakes your lawyers made in your legal documents, you'll excuse the profanity.
It's our experience that lawyers don't make typos because they are bad lawyers. We think typos are actually a sign of just how human the legal drafting process currently is at most law firms. Humans are great at reasoning and bad at copy/paste and proofreading. We think the more important issue is that typos in work product are a clear sign that your lawyers have failed to adopt AI tooling into their workflows. The kinds of mistakes we catch at findthefuckup.com are the kinds of mistakes AI doesn't make (e.g. typos).
| Error type | What it looks like | Who tends to make it |
|---|---|---|
| Human drafting errors | Copy-paste slips, misplaced decimals, mismatched defined terms, stray formatting | Rushed human drafters, rarely AI |
| Unassisted AI drafting errors | Confidently wrong clauses, unsupported assertions, missed context an experienced lawyer would catch | Current AI working without a lawyer, rarely a trained human |
There's a whole other category of errors in legal drafting that get made by AI but that many lawyers don't make. Current AI isn't ready for unassisted drafting, but it is a powerful accelerant in the hands of good lawyers. We built General Legal because we don't think lawyers are adopting AI with sufficient urgency, and we think the right approach to legal is hybrid human-AI. We believe that well-trained human lawyers and AI in collaboration produce far better work product.
See the Errors We've Found
We're cataloguing errors discovered by users (without calling anyone out!) in our gallery.
- General Legal is open-sourcing Find The Fuck Up, a free LLM-based app that flags common drafting mistakes in legal contracts.
- Drafting errors are more common than most non-lawyers assume, even in contracts that cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce.
- A 2014 LexisNexis survey of 100+ top UK law firms found 90% of a random sample of "proofread" legal documents still contained errors.
- Typos aren't proof of bad lawyering, but a sign that a firm hasn't built AI checks into its drafting process.
- A separate category of error comes from unassisted AI drafting; General Legal pairs human judgment with AI review rather than relying on either alone.
- Errors the tool catches are catalogued anonymously in a public gallery, without naming the lawyers or firms involved.
| What was released | General Legal open-sourced Find The Fuck Up, a free tool that flags common drafting mistakes in legal contracts. |
|---|---|
| Why it matters | A 2014 survey of top UK firms found 90% of a sample of already-proofread legal documents still contained errors, showing how common these mistakes really are. |
| What kind of errors | Mostly cosmetic slips like copy-paste errors, misplaced decimals, and mismatched defined terms, though occasionally they can be consequential. |
| Not necessarily bad lawyering | The article frames typos as a sign a firm hasn't integrated AI checks into drafting, rather than evidence the lawyers themselves are incompetent. |
| A different failure mode: AI | Unassisted AI drafting creates its own errors, like confidently wrong clauses, which is why General Legal treats AI as an accelerant for lawyers rather than a replacement. |
| Public error gallery | Errors caught by the tool are catalogued anonymously online, without naming the lawyers or firms responsible. |
What is Find The Fuck Up?
Find The Fuck Up is a free, open-source, LLM-based app built by General Legal that scans a drafted contract and flags common human drafting errors: the kind of typos, copy-paste slips, and formatting mistakes that AI rarely makes but rushed lawyers sometimes do.
Why is it called that?
The name is blunt on purpose. Once you see the kinds of mistakes it catches in real legal documents, the profanity tends to feel earned rather than gratuitous.
How common are errors in legal documents, really?
More common than most clients assume. A 2014 LexisNexis survey of over 100 top UK law firms found that 90% of a random sample of already-"proofread" legal documents still contained errors, largely driven by time pressure on the lawyers drafting them.
Does a typo in a contract actually matter?
Most of the time, no, it's cosmetic. But occasionally a small error, like a decimal point in the wrong place, can be consequential enough to change the deal's outcome, which is why catching them before signature matters.
Is this the same as using AI to draft contracts?
No. General Legal's position is that current AI isn't ready to draft contracts unassisted. It's a powerful accelerant in the hands of a trained lawyer, not a replacement for one. Find The Fuck Up is a checking tool, not a drafting tool.
Can I see examples of the errors the tool has found?
Yes. General Legal publishes an anonymized gallery of real errors the tool has caught, without identifying the lawyers or firms involved.