Yes (not patents in particular).

The name is "law as code".

(My impression: various approaches; mostly academic; some small companies in the space; judging from a loose assessment wrt my career choices as a freelancer: no real business opportunity yet)

I have no idea.

A few months ago, for the first time in my life, I had to write a patent document. It was very complicated – too complicated. Noting the structure, I searched for tools, but found only LLMs. So I wrote my own tool.

The amusing thing is, LLMs prefer the DSL-structured document!

Patents are a much smaller space than the vast legal one in the article, so it's tractable for a human. The raw DSL spec length is roughly comparable to Lua or Go. It's a genuine grammar, with types and an AST; but no conditionals, control flow, expressions, etc. like a regular programming language.

A patent document can be represented in a graph. That opens it up to various transformations, refactoring, and validation – all mathematically rigorous! This is far more reliable than asking an LLM to check a document.

Using git enables not only regular diffs, but also structural diffs, which compare legal elements rather than just lines.

The LSP (yes, that too!) makes drafting much easier, with autocomplete and validation as I type.

I plan to open-source the DSL, and the tool that processes its files and outputs jurisdiction-aware, nicely formatted documents...