When my husband first showed me a contract he was working on, he was reading a 40-page Word document in between meetings, pasting each clause into ChatGPT just to understand what it meant. It reminded me of reading Heidegger. A text designed to intimidate the reader into submission. I'd seen this before; I'd been that person staring at a wall of impenetrable text; I just didn't think anyone outside academia would be in a similar situation. It turns out that, without the budget to hire lawyers, startup founders like my husband have to handle contracts on their own, and the only difference between deciphering contracts and deciphering Heidegger is that one can kill your company, and the other can make you a scholar.
Dense legal language engineered to obscure, to protect one party at the expense of another, to make meaning deliberately hard to reach. That's more than a legal problem. That's a language problem.
As I started looking for the underlying structure. There is a translation problem within every contract, from one party's intent into language, from language back into the other party's intent, with meaning deliberately obscured in the process. I wanted a software that unveils the layer of obscurity so that non-lawyers like my founder husband who have to deal with contracts no longer have to pay thousands of dollars to outside counsel for routine contracts that might not even become a deal.
So I built Fusial.
You forward or upload a contract from your inbox. Fusial reads it against your customizable playbook, what your company does, where it's based, and what compliance frameworks it applies. It then surfaces every clause that matters, tells you what's risky and what's standard, and explains them in plain English that anyone can understand and confidently act on. When the counterparty sends the redlines back, Fusial does the same in reverse, tells you what they changed, why it matters, and what to push back on. And all of your contracts live in a system that remembers, so the next contract from the same vendor doesn't start from scratch.
It is, in a way, a language tool dressed up as a contract redlining software. The thing it looks at is not Heidegger. It's the contract that lands in your inbox on a Wednesday afternoon that you have to review, understand, edit, and sign by Friday.
I spent years with texts that deliberately resist understanding. And it never occurred to me that the entire world outside of academia might need that skill, because most texts people read for work are not novels or essays. They are contracts, terms of service, agreements, policies, written in a language designed to create distance from texts that deserve to be understood.
Fusial closes that distance. And I can't wait for it to help more people like my husband.