Write & Rewrite
Last updated
Last updated
The Write & Rewrite module allows you to either draft new content, or to redraft existing content selected in 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 surrounding paragraphs (or even of the entire document).
It allows you to interactively experiment by having unlimited undo/redo and allowing you to keep redrafting paragraphs until you are ready.
It allows you to insert content with changes being marked ("track changes").
You can open multiple tabsheets in order to draft/redraft multiple paragraphs at once.
As from January 2025, the "Write & Rewrite" module replaces the previous two "Draft" and "Redraft" modules.
This module offers different submodules: draft new content, redraft existing content, AutoCheck, AutoPolish and Checklists.
The Checklists are a bit of a hybrid, in that they involve some reviewing and some rewriting. We'll therefore treat it on a separate page.
Drafting new content involves five steps:
Choose a starting location in your MS Word document.
Write a drafting instruction.
Submit the drafting instruction to the AI engine
Optionally rewrite some fragments
Insert your content into your MS Word document.
Before drafting new content, you are advised to go to the location in your MS Word document where you want to insert the new content. (Typically you will want to insert your text cursor in an empty paragraph, but it's also OK to select one or more paragraphs that will be replaced by the new content).
The reason why you are advised to select the right location in your MS Word document is that ClauseBuddy is layout-aware and will take into account the paragraphs surrounding the position of your cursor, to decide about the numbering, layout and content of the newly drafted paragraphs.
You can always decide to insert the content at some other location in your document. In fact, if your document has a consistent layout and automatic numbering, then this should work reasonably OK (although the content may suffer because of the loss of context extracted from surrounding paragraphs). The reality is that 70% of MS Word documents have poor technical styling, often with many inconsistencies or even manual numbering, so you may regret not having navigated to the right location before instructing ClauseBuddy to perform its drafting.
As a second step, you need to write a drafting instruction for ClauseBuddy's AI engine in the dedicated box at the top.
Instead of drafting an instruction from scratch (see below for some tips & tricks), you can also
load a previously saved drafting instruction using the "..." menu in the top-right corner (see below for more details)
load one of your recently used drafting instructions
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)
With the current AI-technology, it's not possible to draft more than a few clauses at a time, so drafting instructions for entire documents will lead to poor results. The underlying reasons consist of hard constraints regarding length (most LLMs are simply not capable of generating more than about 2000 words), precision (quality really suffers from length) and speed.
Before clicking on the blue Draft button, you may want to consider including the automatically generated document text, by ticking the Include document context checkbox at the top. As explained below, this may lead to better drafting results.
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 either click on the green Amend result button, or instead click on the Retry button to give it another try.
Clicking on the Amend results button means that the result that was produced, is a good starting point for you. You can then take the current result and tweak it further, as per the fourth step below.
When you click on Retry, the same instruction will be submitted once again to the AI. Note that the AI is completely unaware of what it previously generated, so the new results may be completely different, partially similar and occasionally (with very specific instructions) even exactly the same as the previous results. You can use the undo/redo buttons in the top right corner of ClauseBuddy to go back to the previously generated results if in the end you decide that the new results are actually worse.
Once you have accepted the initial drafting results by clicking the Amend results button, you can tweak either or one or more individual paragraphs, or even rewrite the entire text, through additional drafting instructions.
Rewriting individual paragraphs can be done by first highlighting one or more paragraphs, either by clicking on a particular paragraph, or by dragging with your mouse over multiple contiguous paragraphs. You will notice that the blue button below the instruction box will then change to Redraft highlighted, and that an additional grey Clear highlighting button is shown (which allows you to remove the highlighting again).
You can then either enter a new drafting instruction and push the Redraft highlighted button...
... or alternatively select one or more redrafting instructions from the Recent or Suggestions dropdown menus.
Rewriting the entire text is probably less interesting than rewriting just a few paragraphs, because if you're really not happy with the text that was generated by the LLM, then it's probably easier to simply press the Retry button after the text was generated.
Even so, sometimes it's useful to let the LLM add a few additional things throughout the text. To tweak the entire text, just enter a new drafting instruction (or change your existing drafting instruction, or press the Recent or Suggestions buttons) and press the blue Redraft entire text button.
ClauseBuddy will then send the text that was previously created, together with your new drafting instruction, towards the LLM. The LLM will then send back a written text. If you're still not happy, you can undo the operation, or perform yet another redrafting operation, or perhaps even start over completely.
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 Write & Rewrite 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.
Instead of drafting new content, you can also ask ClauseBuddy to redraft existing content. The process is partially similar to drafting new contents from scratch, and essentially entails the following steps:
Select the content to be redrafted.
Write a drafting instruction.
Submit the drafting instruction to the AI engine
Optionally rewrite some fragments
Insert your updated content into your MS Word document.
The most important differences with draft new content 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.
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.
All of this is a limitation of current LLM-technology, which "loses" its attention when it is confronted with large amounts of text and difficult instructions. This will automatically improve over time when better LLM-engines are released by the LLM-vendors (OpenAI/Microsoft, Anthropic, Noxtua, Mistral, Google, etc).
When you redraft existing text, ClauseBuddy will show the changes in red (deletion) and green (insertion). You can toggle this visibility using the Show changes checkbox above:
When an entire paragraph got inserted (green), you can remove it again by clicking on the little undo-button at the right of the paragraph:
You can also remove individual words by clicking on them again — clicking on an inserted word (green) removes it again, while clicking on a deleted word (red) will reinsert the word again. In the example below, clicking on subject to the terms and conditions set forth herein would remove that insertion again.
You can load a previously saved drafting instruction by clicking on one of the predefined instructions at the bottom. 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 the "..." button at the top right and choosing Save.
The instructions are saved on ClauseBuddy's server and are personal to you. Accordingly, they are not shared with your colleagues.
ClauseBuddy will automatically send the paragraphs surrounding the selected paragraph in the MS Word document to the LLM. The LLM will therefore get a merely partial view on the entire document.
For many drafting & redrafting tasks, this is more than enough. Moreover, you may not even necessarily want the LLM to know more about the entire document, e.g. because of compliance reasons, or because you fear that the LLM may get confused because you are asking to (re)draft in a way that is quite contrary to the rest of the document.
However, there are also situations where it would be very useful for the LLM to get a better view of the surrounding document. This is what the Include document context checkbox is for.
When checked, ClauseBuddy will ask the LLM to first create a summary of your existing document, as well as the legal terminology (such as defined terms). It will then send all that information along with the (re)drafting instruction.
You can inspect the summary and the defined terms by clicking on the blue information-icon. You can also hit the Refresh link at the bottom to generate this information again (e.g., when the document or its terminology would have changed so substantially that this terminology is no longer accurate).
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. You may want to explicitly include some context (or rely on the document summary that can be generated automatically, as explained below).
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.
The AutoCheck submodule allows you to automatically optimise multiple clauses at once. The only thing you need to do, is to click on the purple button and chose the party you're acting for. ClauseBuddy will even automatically extract the names of the parties from your document, it couldn't be easier.
For example, a typical clause written to the advantage of the Licensor would be rewritten to the advantage of the Licensee, as follows:
AutoCheck doesn't require any effort at all, and — thanks to ClauseBuddy's layout-awareness — usually even respects the layout of your document. It doesn't get easier than this. The typical use cases include:
Getting inspiration on how you can optimise a text.
Allowing junior lawyers to learn how different parties would optimise a text for their side.
Don't say we suggested this, but also: annoying your counterparty if you don't have much time, by quickly producing some markup.
Providing impressive demos to your fellow lawyers.
AutoCheck relies on the built-in knowledge of GenAI. It cannot read your mind, it has no access to your emails, it is not "trained" on your own content, and does not know what it should do exactly. The results often feel like magic because of the lack of effort, but obviously that lack of effort is also its Achilles heel.
Due to the statistically-focused nature of GenAI, AutoCheck works best for contracts for which millions of examples can be found on the public internet (i.e., not behind any paywall, e.g. those from commercial legal publishers). This is, for example, the case for typical commercial contracts such as sales agreements, license agreements, distribution agreements, NDAs and so on.
Conversely, for local legislation and niche areas of law, don't expect the GenAI to have good predefined knowledge. The results will be less convincing, accordingly.
If a human lawyer would need more context than just the literal text of the document (e.g., background about the relation of the parties, the setup of the deal, the priorities of the parties, etc.), then AutoCheck will likely also produce poor results.
This may sound obvious, but not even GenAI can read your mind, and you'd be surprised how many things are completely obvious to an experienced lawyer due to years of experience, while none of that is even remotely obvious to outsiders. If there are no published conversations online about a certain legal subject, then GenAI is probably clueless about it. So even when every lawyer in your jurisdiction knows that you should never go to court X to file for petition Y, to the extent that everyone would consider it insane to even try this, GenAI will be clueless about it when no one writes about it online — similar to how a junior lawyer would also have to hear this information from someone.
Read more about these caveats in the introduction to reviewing rulesets. If you want more guided results, you must consider developing your own ruleset ("playbook"). Obviously this requires more work, but you will then be able to provide background knowledge, guidance, do's & don'ts, fallback clauses, etc.
AutoPolish allows you to optimise the wording of your text — not so much from a legal perspective, but instead from a more grammatical & common-sense perspective.
AutoPolish has two modes:
With Only correct obvious errors, ClauseBuddy will instruct the LLM to only correct, well, the very obvious errors — similar to what a senior would ask from a junior, as a last review before a document is sent to the counterparty. For example, the following changes are then made:
The use case of this feature is to go beyond Word's standard spellcheck and grammar check, which does not truly "understand" text and only focuses on well-known problems.
The Correct errors and optimise wording goes beyond this. With this option, the LLM will also propose various optimisations. This is the equivalent of asking a native speaker or editor to go through your final text — expect many things where you are positively surprised, but also expect many changes that you don't agree to!
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.
