INEXCUSABLE? BUILDING AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MICRO-EXPERT ON CONTRACT EXCUSE DOCTRINE

Abstract:

This Article details and advocates for a general methodology for creating a “microexpert” grounded

in a user-defined set of legal sources and widely-accessible tools for integrating generative artificial

intelligence (AI) into legal analysis. The study focuses particularly on background contract excuse

doctrines of impossibility, impracticability, and frustration of purpose, which are collectively a

methodologically challenging area of law to rationalize due to fact-intensive variables that undermine

their predictability. Particular challenges include assessing the foreseeability of the event that led to the

contract’s non-performance, the extent of the hardship or burden on the party seeking excuse, and the

purpose of the contract that was allegedly frustrated.

The study uses Google’s popular NotebookLM tool to create an AI microexpert grounded

exclusively in a fifteen-year corpus of judicial opinions involving parties’ assertions of contractual excuses

beyond the express terms of the contract. This source-centric method gives the user maximized control

over the body of legal materials while simultaneously mitigating the risk of AI hallucination. The article

demonstrates that while this tool does not replace human judgment, it enables legal scholars and

practitioners to perform specialized analyses with a depth and scope that are not so efficiently possible if

done manually. The study concludes that this method can be replicated in other areas of law, empowering

lawyers to create reliable, specialized tools for their work.