Introduction to GenAI

The philosophy behind ClauseBuddy is that the future is hybrid: human + traditional software + GenAI. The new type of Artificial Intelligence ("Generative AI" or "GenAI") is here to stay, and will bring a lot of changes to the legal sector. However, not even the brightest and fastest GenAI will replace the human lawyers, and traditional database technology is also more relevant than ever for legal professionals.

When working with GenAI, you will notice that it is very creative, so that it can be at the same time produce brilliant results. Yet it is also highly unpredictable and will also sometimes produce quite inferior results. As former lawyers ourselves we know that this will turn off some legal lawyers, because the results are often far from perfect — but if you avoid the technology, you'll miss out on all the brilliance it frequently offers you and the speed at which it offers those results.

The question is therefore how to get most of the brilliance but avoid the bad results. GenAI is a new software tool on your legal toolbelt that any modern legal professional must master, just like any other tool.

By default, ClauseBuddy integrates with the GPT4.1 "Large Language Model" (LLM), as published by Microsoft. However, that's just the default, because ClauseBuddy is "LLM-agnostic" and actually allows you to use most of the custom LLM's on the market, such as the EU-based Noxtua from Xayn, or Anthropic Claude.

Features

ClauseBuddy offers GenAI-based features and buttons across the entire app, in roughly all modules — for example, also the traditional Quality Library hosts many GenAI functionality. However, several modules in ClauseBuddy (such as Doc Chat, Polish Text, etc) work entirely on the basis of AI. Without AI, these modules would not work.

Drafting clauses

Drafting clauses with the LLM is easy: you go to the Draft New Text feature in the ClauseBuddy menu, click on Draft new text again and enter a query. The software will then come up with an answer after a few seconds, which you can insert into your document, ready to be inserted in the same layout.

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!).

Rewriting clauses

Instead of drafting a new clause, you may want to rewrite existing text:

In both the Draft New Text and Rewrite Text modules, ClauseBuddy will automatically take into account the terminology used in the active document.

You can then use the Rewrite Text to make selected text more in favour of one of the parties if desired.

Keep in mind that the numbering you see in the preview is not final. The numbering will be adjusted based on where the clause will be inserted in the document.

Creating summaries

You can ask the LLM to create a summary of some selected text. You can do so going to the Summarise module, selecting text within your MS Word document (or pasting text when you are using ClauseBuddy outside of Word), and then clicking on the blue Summarise 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 Configure > Create new summary type opens a summary format editor. Here, you can create your own summary type. For instance, a summary rendered as a table with columns for the Date, Party, and Content of the clauses in the selected text (or uploaded document).

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 for Composing full-Documents.

Reviewing documents

The Manage Playbooks and Review document modules are also 100% GenAI-focused. They allow you to create custom rulesets ("playbooks") to automatically review legal documents against your internal standards.

Confidentiality & compliance

GPT4 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 GPT4.1 by default, which does not reuse your data to train the AI (as the free version of the LLMs 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.