Deep Compare

Deep Compare will intelligently line up your active document with some other document that you upload. You can then more easily see the legal differences between various clauses, and even create merged versions of each clause through the Smart Merge feature.

Typical use cases include:

• Situations where you have to use the document of your counterparty, but you want to compare it against your own standard document to see what's missing.

• Law firms that need to review their client's document, and want to compare it against one or more of their own "golden standard" templates.

• Merging two different templates containing partially similar and partially different clauses.

Due to technical limitations in the current technology, the Large Language Model (LLM) will essentially compare short summaries of clauses against short summaries of other clauses.

You should be aware that not only nuances will get lost in those summaries, but also that the comparisons will be made by a language model (instead of a senior lawyer).

In other words, you should really not expect perfection.

First step: Upload a document

When you first initiate Deep Compare, you are invited to choose two documents (From and To), shown next to each other. For both sides, you can choose to either use the currently opened document (if you are using ClauseBuddy in MS Word), or to upload a DOCX or PDF-file:

As always with PDF files, you should be aware that these files need to be converted, which takes considerable time and may lead to small conversion errors. You will get the cleanest and fastest results with .DOC or .DOCX files.

Second step: initiating the compare

Click on the purple Compare button (perhaps choosing a LLM first, if you have multiple LLMs installed) and wait for the AI engine to finish its job.

As the software proceeds, you will notice that labels appear, first on the left side (purple) and then also on the right side (green).

As a final step, the AI engine will align the various clauses of both documents, looking for correspondences between each clause of the left document and one or more paragraphs of the right document.

Third step: checking the contents

When the AI engine is done, you will notice that clauses are lined up with each other. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that the termination clause nr. 7 in the left document gets automatically lined up with relevant termination-related paragraphs (5.3 and 5.4) from the right document.

It will frequently happen that a clause on the left side corresponds to more than one clause at the right side. This is deliberate: as every legal practitioner knows, the same legal subject (e.g., payments) is sometimes concentrated in one clause, sometimes spread over multiple consecutive clauses, and sometimes spread across the entire document.

For the same reason, you will also notice that the AI will often show the same paragraphs from the right-side document for different paragraphs from the left-side. This should allows you, as a legal practitioner, to find relevant clauses. The downside from this approach is that you will get some noise and repetitions.

Understanding the labels

The different labels that are shown above each paragraph in either purple or green, have a specific meaning and functionality.

Hovering over green labels

When you hover over a green label, you get an overview of all the paragraphs of the other document that this label corresponds to. This allows you to determine that a green paragraph not only corresponds to to the purple paragraph above it, but also to several other purple paragraphs elsewhere.

For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that the "Additional charges calculated..." not only corersponds to paragraph 2.2 above it, but also to paragraph 3.3 shown deeper down below.

Label with light background

If the label is show with a light background, then it means that there is no corresponding paragraph in the other document.

For example, in the screenshot below, the first purple label (Amicable dispute resolution) has no corresponding paragraph in the other document, while the second green label (Exclusive jurisdiction) does have a corresponding paragraph

Green label in italic

When a green label is shown in italic, it means that there is a corresponding paragraph — it's just not the one above it.

For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that the green "Company reserves right..." label is shown in italic, because it does not correspond to any of the paragraphs above (3.1), but instead has a corresponding purple paragraph (5.2) elsewhere.

Swapping the order

A very interesting option is to dynamically swap the left & right side, simply by clicking on the Swap button. This allows you to see the inverse line up, i.e. to show all paragraphs from the initial left-side document that are associated with a particular paragraph from the initial right-side document.

Searching

In the top bar of the Deep Compare module, you can see a Search box. When you type some text there, you will see that ClauseBuddy will narrow down the contents to paragraphs from either side that contain your search term:

Merging clauses

You can merge paragraphs by clicking on the Merge button (in the top-right corner of the green box with the right-side documents). This will invoke the standard Smart Merge feature of ClauseBuddy, which allows you to extract the legal features from both sides, and merge them together in an intelligent way.

Other hints

• If you used your currently opened document in MS Word, then you can click on the dark blue title to navigate to that clause in your active Word-document.