Bulk Compare
Use cases
The Bulk Compare module in ClauseBuddy allows you to compare a document against one or more variations. Typical use cases include:
In a due diligence procedure (e.g. in M&A), performing the following types of comparisons:
the target company's model service agreement against 50 signed versions (that are expected to contain certain variations requested by customers, or inserted over time)
the target company's employment agreement against signed versions (that are similarly expected to contain some variations)
For a general counsel of a company, to compare the standard version of the Terms & Condition against all versions negotiated throughout the year, to find "hot zones" of changes that were frequently requested by counterparties. This effectively allows for document intelligence operations.
Similar types of document intelligence:
Compliance teams can compare different versions of regulatory documents or internal policies to ensure all departments are aligned with the latest legal requirements.
Intellectual property lawyers can compare different licensing agreements to identify variations in royalty rates, grant of rights, or other key terms.
Sales teams can compare various versions of sales contracts to identify common changes requested by customers, helping to refine negotiation strategies.
In real estate, the master lease agreement can be compared against various tenant leases to ensure that specific tenant demands have not led to unacceptable variations from the standard lease.
For board resolutions, corporate secretaries can compare different versions of board resolutions to ensure consistency in language and avoid potential conflicts or legal ambiguities.
A bank can compare a standard loan agreement against many signed versions.
During intensive negotiations where multiple persons are working on the same document in a decentralised way, and some central author needs to collect all those changes to different parts of the document, this central author can use the Bulk Compare feature to double-check whether changes from some particular person were not inadvertently forgotten.
A law firm with separate departments that are allegedly using the same version of some standard agreement can find small discrepancies in the wording that creep in over time.
Limitations & differences from due diligence software
The Bulk Compare feature is somewhat similar to certain features offered by legal due diligence software, such as Kira, Luminance and RAVN. However, there are some key differences:
Many legal due diligence software packages require a preparation phase, typically handled by a dedicated lawyer or IT-expert who will configure the data room, upload documents, and so on. ClauseBuddy does not require any such formalities, and will allow any lawyer to simply upload the relevant documents and perform the comparison.
ClauseBuddy deliberately performs literal comparisons, not involving any Generative AI or other natural language processing technology that performs "deep" comparisons of paragraph. If such comparisons are required, traditional legal due diligence software will be required.
ClauseBuddy's Bulk Compare feature is currently limited to 100 documents. Traditional legal due diligence software may offer higher volumes of comparisons.
Usage
The Bulk Compare feature is very straightforward to use.
You first select a base document, either by dragging a file onto the upload area, or by clicking on the upload area and selecting them using the file selection dialog box of Windows/Mac. This will be the document against which all the other documents will be compared, so it should typically be the original or unmodified version of your legal document — e.g., your template or "golden standard" document.
Next, you select/drag up to 100 other documents.
All of these documents can be either MS Word (.DOCX) files or PDF-files.
Keep in mind that PDF-files require a prior conversion step that will not only take additional time (usually about 2 to 5 seconds per page), but will frequently also lead so conversion errors. ClauseBuddy uses the best PDF conversion software on the market, but these kinds of conversion errors are inevitable, particularly when the PDF-file is a scanned document instead of a cleanly produced PDF-file.
When at least one PDF file is involved, ClauseBuddy will ignore single-letter changes, to avoid that small discrepancies will be marked as conversion errors. However, inadvertent comparison errors may nevertheless creep in, depending on the quality of the PDF-file.
When all files are selected, you press the Compare button in the bottom left corner. ClauseBuddy will then upload all your files to ClauseBuddy's server, convert them to PDF where relevant, and finally perform the actual comparison and return the result.
The result will then look similar to the following screenshot:
Each modified paragraph will be highlighted in a shade of yellow — a darker shade means that more documents have made modifications to the paragraph in question.
Below each modified paragraph, ClauseBuddy will show a table with an overview of the changes. Each row of that table will indicate:
In its first column: the number of documents that have made this change.
In its second column: the type of change — e.g. a deletion, insertion or text modification. In the case of a text modification, the modification itself will be immediately shown.
You can also download a DOCX file by clicking on the Report button in the bottom right, essentially containing the same information.
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