Introduction

What is Clause Hunt?

Clause Hunt contains three different modules that allows you to get inspiration.

• Scroll Hunt allows you to visually browse through a selection of your best documents (typically templates), in search of inspiring fragments of text. It allows you to assess the legal merits of candiate clauses within their original context.
• Truffle Hunt allows you to search for interesting clauses through thousands of extracted clauses from old documents. It allows you to quickly line up similar clauses, at the disadvantage of losing the original context of each clause.
• Sample Hunt consists of a collection of over 260,000 high-quality English documents. They emanate from the US SEC authority's EDGAR collection, and mostly consist of corporate, finance, commercial and employment agreements under American law. Sample Hunt uses the technology of Scroll Hunt, so you can visit its manual to learn how to use the interface.

In all three modules, you can either immediately insert a clause into your current document, or save it to your clause library for future reference.

How do Scroll Hunt and Truffle Hunt differ?

The end result of both modules is fairly similar: finding good clauses in previously drafted documents. However, the journey towards those clauses is very different. Both modules have different use cases, and different advantages and disadvantages.

Conceptual differences

• Scroll Hunt is designed to allow you to visually search through DOCX-based high-quality documents. Those documents typically consist of templates and "semi-templates", i.e. the set of "go-to" documents that many legal experts build for themselves over the years (even take with them to new employers), and which they tend to go to over and over again when searching for inspiration.
• Truffle Hunt is designed for mass-searching through thousands of extracted clauses from old documents. Unlike Scroll Hunt, those clauses will not typically be curated. Instead, they will be extracted from your legacy documents, transformed into a legal reservoire of old clauses.

Functional differences

• Scroll Hunt does not separate clauses from their original context. This module shows each relevant document in extenso, but invites you to visually "jump" between different locations in documents that contain candidate clauses, and then assess each candidate clause in its original "neighbourhood".
• Truffle Hunt extracts clauses from their original location, and then performs a line-up of all those extracted clauses. While you can request Truffle Hunt to show other extracted clauses from a same document, a significant part of the context will be lost.

Use case differences

• Scroll Hunt requires you to assess target clauses in their original context. Typically, this involves a quality assessment of whether a clause meets your requirements, taking into account the type of document, the content of neighbouring clauses, the length and style of the original document, and so on. This is intended for quality-driven searches, which may take a bit more time, but tend to lead to better legal results.
• Truffle Hunt is focused on "quick & dirty" searches. Simply by typing a few keywords, you will get hundreds or even thousands of search results from which you can choose a clause. Because the context is (largely) missing, it becomes difficult to assess the merits of each candidate clause. It is therefore speed-focused, instead of quality-focused.

Compliance differences

While both modules can attract certain compliance issues (read more), Truffle Hunt will be particularly problematic, because of the volume of clauses that will typically get stored, as well as the fact that clauses will almost randomly contain confidential information.

Scroll Hunt is instead designed to store a good selection of templates and semi-templates (typically between 20 and 70 per legal expert), so that the amount of confidential information / personal data in it will typically be substantially less.

Why would I use Clause Hunt, instead of my quality clause library?

For most legal experts, a nicely ordened clause library should be the first location to find a clause, as it will generally be the fastest approach during use, with the highest quality, ideally also providing do's and don'ts for each clause.

However, as every legal expert knows, there are situations when you are looking for inspiration. Clause Hunt can then be an interesting avenue to explore, because it allows you to quickly search through a selected set of curated templates/semi-templates (Scroll Hunt) and old documents (Truffle Hunt).

If you are like most legal teams, you will be tempted to think that building a clause collection using Scroll/Truffle Hunt will save you time. The opposite is actually true: while you will indeed save time upfront (uploading takes very limited time), you will pay back for lost time during day-to-day use, because you will have to read through all the found clauses (Truffle Hunt) or the context (Scroll Hunt) with every single search. Conversely, with a quality clause library, you can immediately navigate to the right folder and/or filter on legal characteristics (such as in whose favour a clause was written), and read the nice one-line summary of each clause.

As you can see in the table below, it will all depend on how many clause searches will be done by an entire team. If you do not frequently need to search for clauses, then the upfront investment of building a quality clause library will be high, as compared to the benefits you get from it. Scroll/Truffle Hunt is then obviously the better solution from a speed perspective.

Conversely, if 5 team members each insert 10 clauses on a single day, then Scroll Hunt (50 minutes) and Truffle Hunt (about 70 minutes) will take much more time than a quality clause library (25 minutes) for each single day. Obviously, this adds up over time, so that the investment in a quality clause library is typically "recouped" after a few months of usage.

You should also not forget that speed is not everything — in fact, for a typical legal team, quality is much more important than speed. Particularly when young lawyers are involved, quality clause libraries will lead to much better guidance and higher quality.