Draft New Text
The Draft New Text module allows you to draft new content for your opened MS Word document.
Highlights of this module:
It is layout-aware, by analysing your existing document and trying to mimic the styling and numbering.
It is context-aware during drafting, because it takes into account the content of the entire document.
It allows you to interactively experiment by being able to keep prompting to get new versions of your generated content that match your drafting goal.
It allows you to insert content with changes being marked ("track changes").
You can open multiple tabsheets in order to draft multiple paragraphs at once.
Draft new text
Drafting new content involves a couple of steps:
Choose a starting location by selecting content (entire clause, a bullet point, etc) in your MS Word document.
Hitting Draft New Text
Optionally uploading a file (Word, Excel, Powerpoint or email) from which information can be extracted to complete missing information in the paragraphs you selected.
Write a drafting instruction.
Submit the drafting instruction to the AI engine by hitting Draft
Optionally rewrite some fragments
Insert your content into your MS Word document.
First step: Choose the location of the new content
Before drafting new content, you are advised to select content in your MS Word document before where you want your new content to be positioned when inserted.
The reason why you are advised to select the right kind of content (clause, bullet-point, etc) in your MS Word document is that ClauseBuddy is layout-aware and will take into account the styling used, to decide about the numbering, layout and content of the newly drafted paragraphs.
Second step: write a drafting instruction
As a second step, you need to write a drafting instruction for ClauseBuddy's AI engine in the dedicated box at the bottom.
Instead of drafting an instruction from scratch, you can also:
load a previously saved drafting instruction using the "Prompts" menu in the middle (above the instruction box)
load one of your recently used drafting instructions (also in "Prompts" menu)
load one of the predefined prompt suggestions that ClauseBase offers you (which may have been customised by your organisation, e.g. to offer different standard prompts for different departments)
load an external file (Word, Excel, Powerpoint or email) from which information can be extracted to complete missing information in the paragraphs you selected.
Third step: submitting your instruction
When only one AI engine (LLM) is installed, all you have to do is click on the blue Draft button. Conversely, when multiple AI engines are available to you, you may want to first choose the right one by clicking on the dropdown triangle.
The AI engine will then get to work and draft one or more paragraphs, as per your instructions. This generally takes 5 to 10 seconds, depending on the length and the complexity of your drafting instructions.
When the initial result is proposed, you can then select the entire generated text or individual parts (by clicking the checkboxes next to them), provide an additional instruction and click New Version to get a new version of the generated content based on your additional instruction, or instead click New version without an additional prompt to just give the previous prompt another try.
You will also see that there is a compare button at the bottom right. This allows you to compare the latest version of the generated content with previous versions.
(Optional) Fourth step: adjusting generated content
As already cited, you can rewrite the entire text or individual fragments afterwards. This is done by ticking the fragments on the left-hand side and then entering a new prompt and clicking on New version.
It is also possible to replace one or more fragments with those of a previous version:
Fifth step: insert your content in the opened MS Word file
When you're happy with the results you see in ClauseBuddy, you can insert these results into your currently opened Word-file.
You can do so by going to the purple + Insert button and choosing one of the options.
When you have highlighted one or more paragraphs in ClauseBuddy's Draft New Text module, you get the option of only selecting those highlighted paragraphs (instead of all text visible in the module).
When you have selected one or more paragraphs in your MS Word document, you get the option to insert the text with changes visible "track changes".
You can also copy the text to the clipboard of your computer, so that you can paste it anywhere. Note that this will strip most of the styling, and will also cause the automatic numbering to get hardcoded.
Saving & loading (re)drafting instructions
You can load a previously saved drafting instruction by clicking on one of the predefined instructions in the Saved category in the Prompts menu above your drafting instruction box. ClauseBuddy will then append that instruction's text to whatever text is already written in the instruction box.
You can also save an instruction you've written, in order to reload it at a later moment. You can do so by clicking on Save current prompt button in the same Prompts menu.
Tips on (re)drafting instructions
Writing good AI-prompts is a skill, just like writing good queries for search engines such as Google. It requires a bit of experimentation to fully realise what an AI can write really well, and where it will do a poor job. In general, however, take into account the following rules of thumb:
More instructions is generally better. For example, you'll get decent output when you simply say "Draft a copyright assignment clause", but it's doubtful whether you'll like the results with such an open-ended prompt.
Usually it's a good idea to specify the following elements:
Which party you are acting for, i.e. for whom the clause must be optimised from a legal perspective.
How long the new content should be, specified in absolute terms (e.g., "at most 10 sentences" or "at least two paragraphs"). For some types of content relative terms (e.g., "long" or "short") may work, but that's the exception — not the rule.
Which additional context the AI should be aware of. It may be obvious to state this, but the AI cannot read your mind and is completely unaware of the context of negotiations, the power relation between the parties, precedents, and so on. While ClauseBuddy does automatically scan the document to be able to use the correct terminology, you may want to explicitly include some context.
Which specific elements must be included or avoided, e.g. whether typical exceptions must be included to the obligations imposed on the parties.
You can give limited layout instructions: the LLM can convey towards ClauseBuddy that words must be put in bold, italic, underline or with highlighting. You can therefore give an instruction like "Put a short summary in bold (max. 3 words) at the start of every paragraph."
ClauseBuddy will take great care in keeping your cross-references and bookmarks intact. Unlike naive drafting products, ClauseBuddy will not break/remove these elements, and will not convert them to hardcoded text.
Try to experiment with proofreading commands, e.g. “Correct obvious mistakes, as if you were a junior lawyer reading the final version of the contract prepared by the partner. Only correct real mistakes, not nice-to-haves.” With current LLMs this does not work perfectly for big amounts of text (some errors are simply ignored), but the LLMs frequently do spot mistakes that the MS spell/grammar checker would miss.
General word of warning
Don't expect legal perfection from the LLMs. You will frequently get suboptimal results, and the process may sometimes even lead to no results / errors.
LLMs are not experienced lawyers, given though they have ingested heaps of legal information during their training process.
LLMs are not aware of the latest legal developments (e.g., new case law and recently published statutory texts), and are only aware of publicly accessible data sources.
Don't expect layout perfection either. In practice, the styling of most MS Word documents is particularly bad, so that ClauseBuddy and the LLM together have a difficult job in figuring out the styling. Moreover, the LLMs are somewhat unpredictable — sometimes they give good results back to ClauseBuddy, sometimes not.
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