precedent banks and the half-life of a good clause

The problem

The short version: precedent banks and the half-life of a good clause is easier to get wrong than most teams assume, and the failure is usually silent.

The usual approach is to read for the obvious form of the issue and move on. That catches the clean cases. It misses the ones where the operative language sits somewhere other than where you expect, which in a negotiated document is most of the time.

What we do about it

In the current build this runs as part of the standard pass, so it applies to every document in the set rather than only the ones someone thought to check.

Where it breaks

Scanned originals with poor image quality remain the weakest input. So do agreements that were assembled from three precedents and never reconciled, which is common in long-lived supplier relationships.