In depth

The Similar Clauses feature allows you to search for interesting clauses while typing or browsing through your Word-document. This feature has two typical use modes:

• Alternative clauses: allowing you to very quickly search using semantic search to find clauses that deal with a similar subject, or have similar content. The typical use case is to find inspiration and quickly insert a new clause into your opened document.

• (Nearly) identical clauses: allowing you to very quickly search for clauses that are as identical as possible to your selection to check whether you have written a certain clause (or some text very similar to it) in the past. The typical use case is for compliance tasks to check whether you have written a certain clause (or some similar text) in the past.

In both cases, you can then insert a found clause by hovering over to the plus-icon and clicking on Insert (with changes):

The user interface is deliberately simple, with only a few settings to control.

Choosing relevant sources

In the top bar, you can choose the sources in which the software must search for relevant content:

At the left side, you can choose which "search folders" within your Quality Library should be included. By default, all the search folders you have access to will be included, but you can simply uncheck the ones that are not relevant for you.

At the right side next to it, you can choose which Truffle Hunt "basket" should be targeted.

Both types of sources have their advantages and disadvantages:

• The volume of suggestions within your Quality Library will likely be smaller, so this may result in less matches. At the same time, the quality of the contents will be higher.

• Clauses in the Quality Library may include tags, ratings, comments, descriptions, descriptive titles, etc. that will help you assess the relevant material.

• The Truffle Hunt will then be able to produce more results, but these may be of lower quality than those from the Quality Library.

Triggering a search action

You can request ClauseBuddy to search for relevant clauses in three different ways:

• By simply typing in contents (presumably in an empty paragraph). As soon as you have typed a few letters and pause for a moment, the software will start searching for a match and show it to you. Each time you change your text, it will search again.

• By browsing through a Word-document. Simply positioning your mouse in a paragraph will cause the software to start searching for a matching.

• By selecting text across paragraphs in your Word-document. If you select multiple paragraphs at once, ClauseBuddy will take the contents of all those paragraphs into consideration when searching. Note that you do not need to select all text of the paragraph — just a part of a paragraph is also enough.

How does ClauseBuddy search?

As set out above depending on the mode you select, ClauseBuddy will perform a different type of search:

• Alternative Clauses relies on a vector-based semantic search, meaning it identifies the clauses that are semantically most closely related to your search query. From these, the top 100 results are then reordered by a reranker. This reranker also focuses primarily on semantic similarity, but applies additional layers of intelligence to refine the ranking. It is important to emphasize, however, that semantic similarity is not the same as deep legal reasoning. No GenAI engine can replicate the thought process of an experienced lawyer. Moreover, the technology used here is designed for speed: it can filter through hundreds or even thousands of clauses in less than 0.5 seconds, but that speed does not allow for the application of deeper reasoning. If you require more thoughtful and nuanced results, you should use the Optimize results button. This option invokes a GenAI engine to analyze the search results in more depth. It takes longer (typically around 10 seconds) but provides higher-quality outcomes. Finally, to improve efficiency, if your search query is shorter than 100 characters, Alternative Clauses searches only within the titles of stored clauses. For longer queries, it also searches within the bodies of clauses. This design helps optimize relevance: short phrases (e.g., “Applicable law”) typically produce poor matches when compared against long body texts, so restricting such queries to titles leads to better results.

• (Nearly) Identical Clauses works very differently from Alternative Clauses. Instead of using semantic search, it performs a literal word-for-word comparison. That means it takes the exact words from the text you have selected in your open document and compares them directly with the clauses stored in your Quality Library and in Truffle Hunt. Its purpose is to check whether you (or your organization) have used this clause—or something extremely similar—in the past.

  Importantly, this mode deliberately avoids “smart” search techniques. It does not take into account semantic meaning, synonyms, or paraphrasing. It is designed to be strict and precise.

  To keep the results focused, this mode will return a maximum of 10 results: 5 from your Quality Library and 5 from Truffle Hunt. Each result is then automatically compared against the text you selected, and any differences are highlighted for quick review.

Inspecting & inserting search results

When you see interesting clauses, you can click on the "pin results" icon to pin the search results:

When search results are pinned:

• they will remain on the screen, and will not be replaced by other search results when you navigate to some other paragraph, or change the content of your existing paragraph

• you can easily insert the relevant clause into your open document by pressing the "+" button. When you hover over the "+" button, you can see various options to insert your clause.