Rewrite Text

The Rewrite text module allows you to redraft existing content in your opened MS Word document.

Highlights of this module (same as Draft New Text):

• 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.

Rewriting process

The process is partially similar to drafting new contents from scratch, and essentially entails the following steps:

1. Select the content to be redrafted click on Rewrite Text

2. Click on Rewrite Text

3. Write a redrafting instruction.

4. Optionally uploading a file (Word, Excel, Powerpoint or email) from which information can be extracted to complete missing information in the paragraphs you selected

5. Submit the drafting instruction to the AI engine

6. Optionally rewrite some fragments by providing additional prompts (for the entire text or specific parts). This will give you new versions of the generated text more and more in-line with your goal

7. Insert your updated content into your MS Word document

The most important differences with draft new text from scratch is that ClauseBuddy will introduce changes within the content selected in your MS Word file. For an LLM, rewriting existing content is actually harder than writing new content, because it needs to pay attention to existing styling, and needs to make insertions/deletions/moves — all of which have an impact on the quality.

Consequently, the result will then depend on the redrafting prompt you have given.

Text that ClauseBuddy adds will be underlined and highlighted in green. Text that ClauseBuddy deletes will be crossed out in red.

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:

Fill placeholders

It is also possible to simply fill in the placeholders of selected text.

The use case then is that you have an active document with placeholders and that the info to fill them in (such as party names, dates, etc) is in an external file.

You need to upload the file to Attachments and then check Fill placeholders and then have it redrafted.

After clicking Redraft, the result then looks like this:

Warning about quality

The quality of the output will depend on the amount of text that needs to be redrafted.

• If the LLM's task involves completely rewriting large chunks of text (i.e., if the LLM has to generate completely new chunks of text), then you are strongly advised to rewrite only a few clauses at a time — certainly not more than roughly one page at a time. As LLMs get better over time, this limit will probably improve, but for the moment we advise you to keep your redrafting selection relatively small.

• It is possible to ask the LLM to review many pages at once — e.g., asking it to proofread an entire document looking for obvious mistakes, or to change a certain party from singular to plural. In such case the amount of text that must be produced by the LLM is not so substantial (typically only a few descriptions of words that need to be changed), so often this works reasonably well. However, you are strongly advised to pay attention to what the LLM drafted, because mistakes will arise.

Saving & loading (re)drafting instructions

You can load a previously saved (re)drafting instruction by clicking on one of the predefined instructions in the Saved category in the Prompts menu above your (re)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.