In this article
Kooky
Builder of Shaka, the payment router that pays every agent their commission on closing date.
About Kooky and Shaka →It is nine o'clock on a weeknight, the agent has emailed a contract and a seller disclosure statement, and the offer is expected back in the morning. The documents run to dozens of pages. A general-purpose chatbot is one browser tab away and will accept a PDF. Plenty of Queensland buyers and sellers now do the obvious thing: upload the file and type "explain this to me".
The question this guide asks is what that reading is worth. It looks at the matter from the buyer's or seller's own chair. It draws on what Queensland's courts have published for people who are not lawyers, on the Queensland Law Society's description of how generative AI goes wrong, and on the Queensland Government's own pages about the contract of sale and the cooling-off period. It then goes to the three places in a residential contract where a wrong date does the most damage, to what happens to a document once it is typed into a public tool, and to the work that the law and the published guidance leave with a solicitor.
Two documents, and why people ask software to read them
A Queensland home sale by private treaty puts two documents in front of a buyer. The first is the contract. The Queensland Government's page on the contract of sale, last updated on 23 July 2025, says the contract sets out the price being offered, when the deposit will be paid and the time and date of settlement, and that it becomes legally binding only after both parties sign.
The second is the seller disclosure material. The same page records that from 1 August 2025 sellers must give disclosure documents to the buyer before the buyer signs.
Related readVirtual staging and AI-edited photos: what the law allowsThe government page also describes conditions. A contract may be made subject to the buyer obtaining finance approval, to a satisfactory building and pest inspection, or to the sale of the buyer's existing property. It adds a sentence that matters for everything below: it is the buyer's responsibility to check that those conditions are in the contract when signing.
So the reading task is real, and it falls on a person who is usually not trained for it. A tool that turns dense clauses into plain sentences is attractive for exactly that reason.
How the courts describe what a chatbot does
Queensland's courts and tribunals have published a guideline called The Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): Guidelines for Responsible Use by Non-Lawyers. It was first issued on 13 May 2024 and revised on 15 September 2025. It was written for people running their own cases, but its account of the technology applies to any legal document.
The guideline explains that these tools are built on large language models, which analyse a very large body of text in order to predict the most probable next word, much as autocomplete does. The answer a user sees is, in the guideline's description, the combination of words the chatbot predicts to be most likely. The guideline says plainly that such tools have no intrinsic understanding of what their words mean and no conception of truth.
That description explains both halves of the experience. The output reads fluently because fluency is what the system is built to produce. It can be wrong for the same reason: the most likely sentence about a contract clause is not necessarily the sentence that is true of the clause in front of the user.
Related readAgency chatbots and tenants: what an automated reply cannot doWhat the guideline says a chatbot may help with
The guideline is not hostile to the tools. It accepts that a chatbot may help a person organise material, suggest headings and layout, and comment on grammar. It also says chatbots can be useful for condensing or summarising information or presenting it in a different format.
The summary point comes with a condition. Any such use, the guideline says, would need to be carefully reviewed to ensure the summarised passage carries the same meaning as the original. For a contract that condition is demanding. A summary of a clause is only safe once someone has read the clause and confirmed the summary matches, which is the reading the user was hoping to avoid.
Used with that in mind, a chatbot has a modest and real place for a buyer or seller. It can explain an unfamiliar word. It can lay out the parts of a long document in an order that makes the original easier to find one's way around. It can help a person prepare a list of questions. Each of those uses ends with the person going back to the page.
What it says a chatbot cannot do
The other list in the guideline is longer. Generative AI chatbots, it says, cannot understand the unique facts of a person's situation, cannot understand the broader Australian social and legal context, and cannot be trusted always to provide legal or other information that is relevant, accurate, complete, up to date and unbiased. They cannot give reliable legal advice tailored to a specific case, and they are not a substitute for a qualified lawyer.
Related readAI-drafted condition reports: what Queensland tenancy law still asksIt then lists the known failures. Chatbots can make up cases, citations and quotes, or refer to legislation and texts that do not exist. They can give incorrect or misleading information about the law or how it applies, and their answers may be based on overseas law that does not apply in Australia. Their training data may be out of date. They can get facts wrong. And the guideline warns that invented material can look as though it came from a real source.
| Weakness the guideline lists | How it could surface in a contract reading | What to check it against |
|---|---|---|
| Law from another place | A cooling-off rule stated with another jurisdiction's length or penalty | The Queensland Government's cooling-off page and the warning statement in the contract |
| Out-of-date training data | An answer that predates the seller disclosure rules of 1 August 2025, or describes an earlier edition of the contract | The edition printed on the contract itself |
| Facts wrong | A date, price or name restated incorrectly from the reference schedule | The schedule, line by line |
| No grasp of the particular situation | A special condition explained as if it were a standard one | The solicitor acting on the sale or purchase |
The first column paraphrases the Queensland courts' guideline. The second column is this magazine's illustration of where each weakness could matter, not a record of observed errors.
The second column of that table is illustration only. No source read for this guide measured how often a chatbot misreads a Queensland contract, and nothing here should be taken as a finding that a given tool does or does not make a given mistake.
The Law Society's account of AI errors
The Queensland Law Society addressed the same technology from the profession's side in Guidance Statement No. 37, Artificial Intelligence in Legal Practice, published on 31 May 2024. The statement is directed to solicitors, and how a firm applies it is a separate subject. Three of its observations are useful to anyone using a chatbot on their own.
The first is its definition of hallucination: the propensity of a generative AI system to create output in which certain components appear plausible but have been invented. The second is its remark that the performance of large language models in undertaking research or performing calculations can be erratic. The third is its statement that current AI does not understand the content it generates and cannot be relied upon to validate its own output.
Related readAI suburb forecasts and growth scores: what an agent may pass onThe second and third observations bear directly on contract dates. Working out a deadline is a small calculation: a starting day, a number of days, a rule about which days count. That is the kind of task the Law Society describes as erratic. And asking the tool "are you sure?" settles nothing, because on the Society's account the tool is not able to check itself.
The statement also sets a standard for whoever checks AI output inside a law practice: that person must have sufficient knowledge of the area of law to be capable of detecting errors. A buyer reading alone at night is, by definition, the person without that knowledge. That is no criticism of buyers. It is the reason the check has to be made against the document and, where the stakes justify it, by someone qualified.
Three dates where a wrong answer costs a buyer
Most of a contract can be misunderstood for a day or two without harm. Three points cannot, because each is tied to a deadline after which a right is gone.
The cooling-off period ends at 5pm, not at midnight
The Queensland Government states that the period ends at 5pm on the fifth business day and that a termination notice must be delivered before then. An answer that gives the right date and omits the hour is still an incomplete answer.
The cooling-off period. The Queensland Government's cooling-off page states the rule. The period is 5 business days. It starts on the day the buyer receives a copy of the contract signed by both parties, and if that day is a weekend or public holiday it starts on the next business day. It ends at 5pm on the fifth day. To terminate, the buyer gives written notice to the seller or the seller's agent and delivers it before 5pm on the final day. The seller must then refund the deposit within 14 days and may deduct a penalty of up to 0.25% of the purchase price.
Related readAI-written listing descriptions: who answers for the errors?The same page lists when there is no cooling-off period at all: where the property is sold at auction, and where a private treaty contract is entered into within 2 business days of an unsuccessful auction by a buyer who was a registered bidder. It also says a buyer can waive or shorten the period by written notice. A general explanation of "the cooling-off period" that leaves out those cases describes a right the particular buyer may not have.
The finance clause. In the REIQ residential contract the finance condition is clause 4.1. The government page describes it in general terms as a condition about obtaining finance approval. This guide does not restate the clause's mechanics. The point for present purposes is narrower: whatever date the signed contract gives for finance is the one that binds, not a chatbot's restatement of it.
The building and pest clause. The inspection condition is clause 4.2. An article published by the REIQ on 14 October 2025, written by a lawyer from the firm Carter Newell, explains that a buyer who seeks to terminate on the basis of an inspection report must act reasonably under clause 4.2(2)(a), and that under clause 4.2(3) the seller may require the buyer to produce the report without delay. Whether a buyer has acted reasonably is a judgment about a particular report and a particular house. It is the type of question the courts' guideline says a chatbot cannot answer, because it turns on the unique facts.
An illustration: counting five business days
The following example is illustrative. The buyer, the price and the dates are invented, and the faulty answer is a hypothetical used to show the arithmetic, not a record of what any tool said.
Related readTenant scoring software: the limits Queensland law puts on rankingA buyer signs a contract for a house at $800,000. The seller signs on the Friday, and the agent emails the buyer a copy signed by both parties on Saturday 5 September 2026. Assume there is no public holiday in the following week.
On the government's statement of the rule, a copy received on a weekend means the period starts on the next business day, Monday 7 September. Counting that Monday as the first day, the fifth business day is Friday 11 September, and the period ends at 5pm that day.
Now suppose the buyer asks a chatbot when the cooling-off period ends and receives an answer that counts five days from the Saturday: Thursday 10 September. That answer is a day early. An error in the other direction is the costly one. An answer that named the following Monday, 14 September, would be late, and a buyer relying on it could deliver a notice after the right had ended.
- Saturday 5 SeptemberThe buyer receives the contract signed by both parties. A weekend day, so the period has not started.
- Monday 7 SeptemberThe next business day. On the government's wording the period starts here.
- Friday 11 September, 5pmThe fifth business day. A termination notice must be delivered before this time.
The money attached to the right is small beside the money attached to losing it. If this buyer terminated in time, the seller could keep up to 0.25% of $800,000, which is $2,000. A buyer who misses the deadline no longer has that exit and remains bound to a purchase of $800,000 unless another condition of the contract applies.
The illustration relies on this guide's reading of a government summary page, and even that reading is the sort of thing a buyer should confirm for their own dates. That is the lesson in miniature: the count depends on which day the signed copy arrived, on public holidays and on the wording of the rule, and each of those has to be taken from the source.
Special conditions and the disclosure statement
Special conditions are different from the printed clauses. They are written for one sale. The government page's warning that the buyer must check the conditions in the contract applies with most force here.
The courts' guideline explains why a general tool is weakest at this point. A special condition is the "unique fact situation" in written form. A chatbot can rephrase it. On the guideline's account it cannot be trusted to say what the condition does to the rest of the contract or to the buyer's position.
The seller disclosure material raises a similar issue from another direction. The Queensland Government's page says that if the seller does not comply, whether or not that was intentional, the buyer may be able to terminate the contract up to settlement where documents are missing or contain inaccurate or incomplete information. For a claim of inaccuracy, it says the buyer must show that the matter was material, that the buyer was not aware of it when signing, and that the buyer would not have signed had they known.
Those three tests are about the buyer's own knowledge and decision, not about the text alone. A chatbot can list what a disclosure statement contains. It has no means of knowing what the buyer was told at the open home, what the buyer already knew, or what would have changed the buyer's mind, and the page makes those the questions that decide the right.
What happens to a document typed into a public tool
A contract of sale is a private document. It names both parties and the property, and on the government's description it sets out the price, the deposit and the settlement date. The disclosure material adds more about the property. Uploading the file sends all of it to the operator of the tool.
The courts' guideline is blunt on this. It tells non-lawyers not to enter any private, confidential, suppressed or legally privileged information into a generative AI chatbot. Its explanation is that some chatbots remember every question and everything else put into them, that the information could be repeated in response to queries from other users, and that anything entered could become publicly known. It specifically mentions the risk of accidentally disclosing someone else's private or confidential information.
That last phrase deserves attention in a sale, because a contract belongs to two sides. A buyer who uploads it also uploads the seller's details, and the reverse is true for a seller.
The Law Society's statement, written for solicitors, shows the level of care the profession is asked to apply to the same decision. It says practitioners must take reasonable steps to ensure an AI tool does not misuse access to confidential data, notes that providers may use data for AI training, and says that where a user agreement does not give a clear answer, practitioners should be very hesitant before allowing any access to confidential data at all. A member of the public is not bound by that statement. It is still a fair measure of how seriously the question is taken by people who handle contracts every day.
The practical consequence is simple to state. Asking a chatbot what a term such as "subject to finance" generally means involves no private information. Uploading the signed contract does.
What stays with a Queensland solicitor
Three published sources point the same way on where the line sits.
The Queensland Government's contract page advises buyers to get independent legal advice from a solicitor before signing. The courts' guideline says that using AI is not an alternative to seeking legal advice, that it should not be a person's sole or main source of legal information, and that legal information from a chatbot should be checked with a lawyer where possible. The REIQ article on the building and pest clause adds the position of the agent in the transaction: agents must not provide legal advice, and buyers and sellers are to be referred to their solicitors.
Behind those statements is section 24 of the Legal Profession Act 2007. It provides that a person must not engage in legal practice in Queensland unless the person is an Australian legal practitioner, with a maximum penalty of 300 penalty units or 2 years imprisonment. The section is about who may practise law. Nothing in its wording as read for this guide stops a person reading their own contract, with or without software, and this guide does not suggest that using a chatbot offends it. What the section does show is where Queensland law places advice on a contract: with a practitioner who holds the qualification and answers for the advice.
That accountability is the difference a buyer is paying for. The Law Society's statement describes AI tools as an aid to, and not a replacement for, professional judgment, and says that an error in a technical system may explain but not absolve negligent client service delivery. A solicitor who gives a wrong date answers for it. The guideline for non-lawyers puts the equivalent responsibility on the user: whoever relies on a chatbot's answer is the one responsible for its accuracy.
Using a chatbot without relying on it
None of this means a buyer or seller should leave the tool closed. The published guidance supports a short set of habits that keep the benefit and remove most of the risk.
- Ask about general terms and concepts, not about the signed document, so that no private information is entered.
- Treat every date, amount and name in an answer as unverified until it has been found in the contract's schedule.
- Check any statement of a Queensland rule against a Queensland source. The courts' guideline points to the Queensland Legislation website for this purpose.
- Read each special condition in full in the original, and take a list of questions about them to the solicitor.
- Confirm the cooling-off end date and time, the finance date and the inspection date with the solicitor in writing as soon as the contract is signed.
The guideline's own summary of a chatbot's proper place is that it does not replace a qualified lawyer. For a document that commits a household to the largest purchase it is likely to make, the published advice from the government, the courts and the industry's institute is the same advice given before the tools existed.
A chatbot can make a contract easier to approach. The dates that bind are the ones written in the contract, and the person who answers for advice on them is a solicitor.
Kooky, from Shaka
Kooky edits Queensland Estate and builds Shaka, the payment router he made for Queensland property professionals. One payment comes in, and every agent, agency and party in the deal receives their signed share on closing date.
