Using AI in ClauseBuddy

By default, ClauseBuddy integrates with the revolutionary GPT-4 'Large Language Model' (LLM), as published by Microsoft. Keep reading to find out how you can leverage the power of this new technology right from within ClauseBuddy!

See also: Custom LLMs.

Features

Drafting full documents

You can instruct the LLM to generate an entire outline of a document, and then interactively add clauses to them — either from your own clause library, or generated by the LLM.

Read more about it on our dedicated page.

Drafting clauses

Drafting clauses with the LLM is easy: you simply formulate a request in the big box, and click on the blue Draft button. The software will then come up with an answer after a few seconds. If you do not like the result, or want some additional variations, simply click on the Draft button again.

You can then either insert the text into your current MS Word file by pressing the button to the left of each result (or, as shown on the screenshot, copy the text to the clipboard when you are working in a browser).

You can also click on the ... button at the right side to get a dropdown-list with additional options:

• Store the resulting clause into your clause library, perhaps after some cleanup. As it may take a few tries from you (reformulating your prompt) and the LLM, it is probably a good idea to store a clause into your own clause library, so that you and your colleagues can retrieve the clause even faster in the future.

• For similar reasons, you may instead want to send the resulting clause to a curator in your team.

• If you have a ClauseBuddy account that supports multiple languages: translate the result into other supported languages.

The results consist of plain text. If you would like to generate paragraphs with numbering, additional formatting, automatic layout, etc. than use the Document module instead.

Drafting other legal texts

Above we talked about contract clauses, because those will be the most frequently produced paragraphs of text. However, you can also ask the LLM to draft other types of text — from short summaries of some legal rule, to grammatical enhancements of certain fragments to text, to even poems (legal poems, of course!).

Creating text alternatives

Instead of drafting a clause, you may want to create an alternative version of some selected text. You can do so going to the Alternatives tab, selecting text within your MS Word document (or pasting text when you are using ClauseBuddy outside of Word), and then clicking on the blue Find alternative button.

The way you use the results is similar to drafting clauses, as described above.

Creating summaries

Finally, you can also ask the LLM to create a summary of some selected text. You can do so going to the Summarize tab, selecting text within your MS Word document (or pasting text when you are using ClauseBuddy outside of Word), and then clicking on the blue Summarize button.

By default a summary is 'Simple' — i.e. a short, single paragraph. But it is also possible to produce more structured summaries like so:

Selecting Custom > New opens a summary format editor. Here, you can modify, save, and load settings for subsequent summaries. For instance, a summary rendered as a table with columns for the Date, Party, and Content of the clauses in the selected (or pasted) text.

The way you use the resulting summaries is similar to drafting clauses, as described above.

Confidentiality

GPT3 and its successors has surprised the legal world, and many legal teams and law firms have published warnings about being careful with this technology — particularly as regards the hallucinations that may happen for very factual answers (much less a risk for typical contract clause drafting)

ClauseBuddy uses Microsoft Azure's version of GPT4 by default, which does not reuse your data to train the AI (as the OpenAI version does, which potentially causes confidentiality leaks). As explained on Microsoft's technical website, Microsoft only reserves the right to look into your data to investigate abuses or technical failures.

For more in-depth information about this topic, see the section on "confidentiality" in our blog post "Generative AI - fall update".

Do note that, at this moment, the free version of ClauseBuddy uses the Microsoft-version of GPT4 with servers located in the United States. (The paid version uses Microsoft's servers located in France.) However, you can enjoy all the data protection guarantees that Microsoft offers.

Word of warning

GPT is still an experimental technology, and you should be aware that it is not yet 100% stable from a technical perspective. Accordingly, you will sometimes get errors from the service, for inexplicable reasons.

Also, you should be aware that Microsoft (similar to OpenAI) applies content filtering on the prompts and the answers. Any profanity, sexual content, semi-illegal content, etc. will therefore likely be refused by GPT4.