Executive Summary
A SaaS startup came to us needing a Terms of Service document before their Series A closed, on a deadline their legal counsel described as "aggressive" and their CEO described as "yesterday." Rather than write one, we built a small cluster of typewriters, staffed it with members of our troop, and let the infinite monkey theorem run until it produced 14 pages of legally parseable text. This paper documents the infrastructure, the sampling methodology, and the one clause that made it into the final document completely by accident and that the client's lawyers have since described as "surprisingly airtight."
The Challenge
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter, given infinite time, will almost surely produce any given text — including, hypothetically, the complete works of Shakespeare. Our client did not need Shakespeare. They needed Section 14(b), Limitation of Liability. We reasoned that a narrower target should require dramatically less time than infinite. We were only partially correct.
Our Approach: The Typewriter Cluster
We assembled six mechanical typewriters in the shed that also serves as our global headquarters (see photo above; the satellite dish is unrelated and, as far as we can tell, non-functional). Each typewriter was staffed by one member of our troop working in 20-minute shifts, which is roughly the limit of monkey attention span and, coincidentally, also the limit of most human attention spans in a Terms of Service meeting.
Output was collected, OCR'd, and run through a simple filter we call the "Legal Plausibility Score" — a Pascal program that checks each generated paragraph for the presence of at least three of the following words: "hereinafter," "notwithstanding," "indemnify," "sole discretion," or "banana." Paragraphs scoring above threshold were forwarded to an actual lawyer, who we pay separately and who has asked not to be named in this white paper.
Sampling infrastructure
Roughly 1 in 40,000 typed pages cleared the threshold. At six typewriters running 20-hour days (monkeys need four hours off for banana breaks and existential reflection), we produced a usable Terms of Service in eleven days — well within the client's "aggressive" deadline, and considerably faster than the theorem's namesake infinity would suggest.
Results
"Section 9(c) is, and I say this as someone with a law degree, better written than anything my previous firm produced. I have chosen not to ask how it was generated." — External Counsel, the client
Lessons Learned
The typewriter cluster is not, in any meaningful sense, faster or cheaper than hiring a lawyer to write a Terms of Service from a template, and we want to be upfront about that in the interest of the white paper format's implied rigor. What it is, is more interesting, and our client's Series A pitch deck did include a slide about it, which several investors reportedly found "memorable in a way the unit economics slide was not."
We would not recommend this approach for any document requiring precision, nuance, or the ability to be understood by the client's own founders, none of whom have read past Section 3.
Staff Banana Officer, Designed by Monkeys