Introduction to GenAI
Last updated
Last updated
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 GPT4o "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.
See also: Custom LLMs if you want to bring your own LLM.
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, the modules shown in pink on the homepage are 100% dedicated to GenAI.
Drafting clauses with the LLM is easy: you go to the Write & Rewrite module in ClauseBuddy, click on Draft new text 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 (usually).
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!).
Instead of drafting a new clause, you may want to redraft existing text:
Through the Write & Rewrite module, you can even automatically optimise your clauses for one party (e.g., the buyer versus the seller), or submit your text for automatic proofreading (as if you asked your junior colleague to do a last check of your text).
You can ask the LLM to create a summary of some selected text. You can do so going to the Summarize 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 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.
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.
The Manage reviewing rules and Review document modules are not shown in pink on ClauseBuddy's home page, but they are also 100% GenAI-focused. They allow you to create custom rulesets ("playbooks") to automatically review legal documents against your internal standards.
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 GPT4o 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.
For more in-depth information about this topic, see the section on "confidentiality" in our blog post "Generative AI - fall update".
Warning. You should be aware that GenAI technology is 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.
