How Small Businesses Transform PDF Agreements into Action

A legal agreement is a type of procedural document that describes the steps that parties must take to fulfill legal obligations. Following these steps requires human interpretation, which is often inefficient and error prone. For a Small to Medium Sized Business (SMB), this process is laborious. We conduct an interview study to understand how information in PDF agreements is currently understood, processed, and acted upon by SMB employees working in small teams of non-domain experts. Through qualitative analysis and a text highlighting activity, we observe knowledge transfer workflows in SMBs and propose design principles for using AI-extracted information to create actionable documents that address gaps in efficiency, understanding, and agency.