Abstract/Summary

This article considers the issues concerning the rectification and construction of computer-generated legal documents, whether bilateral instruments such as contracts or unilateral instruments such as wills. There will inevitably be errors in some of these documents due to bugs in the computer programs that direct the document assembly process of producing them from a set of precedents. It considers how the law, never designed for this novel situation, will be applied or developed.There are particular difficulties for wills because the law was set down in in the Administration of Justice Act 1982, ss 20–21, and statutory law is less flexible than judge-made law. This article also presents the results of a small investigation, revealing errors actually made in commercially available generated wills, showing the problem is not merely theoretical.