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

Authors

• Burge, Mark Edwin

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.

Recommended Citation

Burge, Mark Edwin, INEXCUSABLE? BUILDING AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MICRO- EXPERT ON CONTRACT EXCUSE DOCTRINE, 66 Santa Clara L. Rev. 244 (2026).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.scu.edu/lawreview/vol66/iss2/4