How do I search for specific legal content in a large volume of documents?
Last updated
Last updated
As you might know, ClauseBuddy is primarily designed for working with a single document. There are some features that allow you to work with a handful of documents (like DocAnswer), but for larger collections of documents, you may want to explore other options that are better suited to handling this volume.
There are some approaches we may take here:
What you should look for here, is matching clauses — so your search must be at the clause-level and not on document-level because that one is primarily designed to deliver you matching full-documents. (E.g., to answer questions such as “which document in my drafting history would I take as a start when drafting a contract containing legal topics A, B and C?”.)
Tip 1: Use a search query that contains a description
Truffle Hunt’s clause-level AI-engine searches uses “semantic matching” technology (often also called “RAG” nowadays). With such engine, it’s usually much better to include more than one significant keyword otherwise you get a lot of matches on clauses containing sentences that are somehow semantically related to for example “transfer” (e.g., also “copy”, “moving”, etc.). What you should instead be using, is a search query that contains a description, or at least a bunch of words, that are typically found in what you're looking for. For example for transfer provisions, you could apply something like “transfer or assignment of contract to other party”. Depending on how your target clauses are worded, you may get good or suboptimal results. Remember that this technology doesn’t think as deeply about your content as an LLM (like the one used in DocAnswer), but when there’s a good semantic match, it should find what you’re looking for.
Tip 2: Load all results
Be sure to load all the results through the “Load more” button at the bottom (for performance reasons, it works in batches of 20 per time).
Tip 3: Export to Word or Excel
Through the “...” in the right corner you can then also export your results to Word or Excel.
If the above method doesn't meet your needs, you may want to consider exploring due diligence software as an alternative.
This software is specialized for the types of searches mentioned above and is commonly used by large law firms for similar tasks.
