From the Mind of Trevor Stone

I signed my Google separation agreement today. I'd been sitting on it because one clause seemed a little weird, but I wasn't able to find any discussion of it. Most of the agreement is set up to limit future legal risk to Google based on my employment there, in exchange for paying me a bunch of money. For example, it says I won't sue them for workplace harassment or unfair labor practices I might have experienced there. But the no cooperation clause doesn't seem to be limited to just events related to my employment:

11. No Cooperation. Other than in connection with filing a charge or participating in any investigation or proceeding conducted by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, or other comparable federal, state, or local agency, or under a valid subpoena or court order to do so, or otherwise as permitted by applicable law, you will not counsel or assist any attorneys or their clients in the presentation or prosecution of any disputes, differences, grievances, claims, charges, or complaints by any third party against the Company, Alphabet Inc. or any Released Party. For attorneys, nothing in this Section (No Cooperation) will restrict or limit your right to practice law or represent future clients, as described in the state bar rules of professional conduct of the state in which you are licensed to practice law (“the Rules”); provided, however, that you must honor all of your other continuing ethical obligations to the Company and the Released Parties under the Rules, including as to client confidentiality and privilege. Notwithstanding the foregoing, consistent with applicable law, nothing in this Agreement prevents you from disclosing the facts or circumstances underlying your claim or action for sexual assault, sexual harassment, workplace harassment or discrimination, the failure to prevent workplace harassment or discrimination, or retaliation for reporting or opposing harassment or discrimination.

This stands in contrast to the cooperation clause, which follows next and is specifically tied to topics "that relate to matters within your knowledge or responsibility during your employment with the Company."

12. Cooperation with the Company. You agree to cooperate with the Company regarding any pending or subsequently filed internal investigations, litigation, claims, or other disputes or legal proceedings involving the Company that relate to matters within your knowledge or responsibility during your employment with the Company. Without limiting the foregoing, you agree: (a) to meet with the Company’s representatives, its counsel, or other designees at reasonable times and places; (b) to provide truthful testimony to any court, agency, or other adjudicatory body; and (c) to provide the Company with notice of contact by any adverse party or such adverse party’s representative except as may be required by law. The Company will reimburse you for your time at a reasonable hourly rate and other reasonable expenses in connection with the cooperation described in this Section.

To my non-attorney reading, the no cooperation clause attempts to prohibit me from assisting an attorney with a lawsuit regarding facts which occur far in the future from now. For example, if ten years from now I work at Acme Inc and am involved in a contract dispute regarding business conducted between Acme and Google it seems surprisingly restrictive to claim I can't work with Acme's lawyers on a lawsuit against Google just because I took an exit package from Google a decade before the matter in dispute arose.

Since this bug in the contract is hypothetical—I don't have any particular plans to get involved in a lawsuit against Google—it's not worth six figures to me not to sign the agreement, or to go track down an employment lawyer to explain why the paragraph doesn't work the way I'm reading it. If the issue comes up, I'll let the attorney who wants my input figure out what it means.

At the Aaron Swartz memorial in San Francisco (video), some interesting themes emerged.

The first is Aaron's passion for machine-readable public information. This principle is at the core of much that Aaron did, from enabling search engines to find public domain and CC-licensed content to downloading swaths of paywall-guarded documents so that the public can have access to its own information.

The second is the unbalanced power wielded by prosecutors. Aaron killed himself in part because he felt helpless when faced with a multimillion dollar federal trial featuring 13 felony counts. If Aaron couldn't face this, what hope have ordinary folks who aren't close friends of Harvard law professors, rights advocacy organizations, and expert witnesses, not to mention a chunk of cash from selling an Internet startup. Faced with expensive defense lawyers and the fearsome specter of the government's prosecutors, only 3% of cases make it to the trial which we're constitutionally promised.

The third, expressed by his girlfriend Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman and fellow document liberator Carl Malamud was a call to the technologists and scholars and activists to become radicalized. Aaron did big things because he thought they mattered. Like Peter Singer, he stressed about the opportunity cost of not doing the most important thing in the world. His death has become, in part, a call for people in the free culture movement to step up and do more.

So here's an interesting challenge that combines all three: write a program that interprets and presents law. Though they predate computers by a few thousand years, laws are meant to be something like human-runnable source code. They're detailed, they're written explicitly, and they apply to everyone. And yet in many cases it takes someone with a graduate degree to understand what they say. People with graduate degrees are expensive and unevenly distributed.

Imagine we had a program which could turn laws and judicial opinions into machine-readable format. We could then write programs that took those laws and presented them in various ways, helping lay people understand both core details and subtle interactions. We could write other programs to organize this legal information into arguments given the evidence about a case.

Compared to people with graduate degrees doing stuff, running computer programs is free. Someone without a lot of resources could understand what they're charged with, explore similar cases, and collaborate with friends on a defense. There'd still be a role for lawyers to conduct the defense at trial and advise on the best way to convince a jury, but the time spent at trial is today dwarfed by the time and expense preparing for it. Let the humans do what they're good at&endash;convince humans of things&endash;and let the computers do what they do best&endash;tirelessly and cheaply examine lots of data and find useful patterns.

Like a patient who comes to a doctor after reading the medical literature and closely observing his body, a defendant who comes to a lawyer with a solid understanding of the relevant laws is in a much better position to face the plaintiffs and prosecutors who have the deck stacked in their favor. If we can make computers understand law, we can empower all citizens, regardless of income, to make fair use of the due process granted them by the constitution.

Building such a system wouldn't be easy. Human language is still hard for computers to understand. And legalese is even hard for humans to understand. There are all sorts of powerful people and organizations, private and governmental, with interests vested in law and courts being expensive and difficult to access. It's not easy, and that's why it should be done. A hard, ambitious, and meaningful project like this would capture the spirit that's been raised in Aaron Swartz's wake.