Searching by keywords
Last updated
Last updated
Searching by keywords is probably the most "natural" way to search: it is similar to how you search in Google or Bing. Just enter a few words, and the software will go on a hunting mission inside your clause library.
Entering keywords is probably just the start of your search journey. When you are presented with a list of clauses, you will probably want to perform some filtering to quickly narrow down your results.
When searching by keywords, you can choose between two different modes: smart and strict.
The default search mode is smart. In this mode, ClauseBuddy uses an intelligence layer to search for clauses that semantically match what you type in. The search will not be literal, so that descriptions and synonyms will usually also result in the right clause being shown at the top.
You can also search in strict mode, by enabling the checkbox to the right of the search box. In strict mode, the search is performed in a literal way. Even though grammatical variations are allowed (e.g., searching for "claims" will also find clauses containing the singular "claim"), clauses that contain synonyms of your keywords will not be included in the search results.
You can quote keywords if you want the keywords to appear next to each other. For example, "holiday entitlement" will only find clauses that contain the word holiday and the word entitlement (or linguistic variations of those words) next to each other.
You can insert a hyphen before a keyword to remove clauses containing that keyword from the search results. For example, when you want to find clauses containing the words "holiday" and "entitlement" but not the word "termination", you can enter holiday entitlement -termination in the search box.
In an enriched clause library, you can also search for keywords found in the filename, clause description or internal legal comment. For example, when you want to search for a Texas shoot out clause in corporate law, you may want to search for the word Texas, even when that word would not literally appear in the actual clause title or body.
It's called keyword search, but you can actually also search on a clause's internal number. For example, instead of sending an entire clause to a colleague by email, you can tell the colleague to insert clause 123454121 — by entering that number as a keyword, the colleague will immediately find that particular clause.
You can find the internal number of the clause through the "..." menu in the top-right corner of the clause, and then submenu Additional information
Smart mode works best if you submit several keywords at once (e.g. confidential information exclusions), or even a short description (e.g. liability limitation with a maximum equal to the invoiced amount). Similar to how you would confuse humans when only giving one word (e.g. confidentiality), smart mode does not work so well if you provide only one word.
If multiple languages are enabled then, even though the results will be in the language you selected in the dropdown list, you can use keywords in any language you want. For example, in the screenshot below, you can see that English was selected and that the search result was in English, but the keywords were actually in French.
In strict mode, you can combine multiple keywords to narrow down your search. For example, if you are searching for employment clauses and enter holiday entitlement, ClauseBuddy will find clauses that contain both the word holiday and the word entitlement (or linguistic variations of those words). Note that both words do not need to be next to each other in the clause, in order to be found.
ClauseBuddy will ignore stop words, i.e. keywords that have no information value — e.g. words such as the, that, if, and so on (depending on the language).
Many users will naturally gravitate towards keyword search, as everyone is very familiar with it. Even though the smart mode allows you to search with a level of intelligence, you should realise that keyword searches may not always be the best approach. The reason is that clauses tend to share popular legal keywords, such as obligation, contract, property, liability and so on.
You may not notice this when starting your ClauseBuddy journey, but once your library reaches a few hundreds clauses, you will notice that those keywords become less useful, as they will turn up many results.
Keyword searches are ideal when the clause you are looking for contains a few fairly specific words that are not found in too many other clauses in the library. For example, when searching for intellectual property clauses in employment law, the keyword trademark may be a very good keyword, while that keyword would be a poor candidate when searching in an intellectual property clause library.
Keyword searches can also still work reasonably well when your clause library is highly segmented, into different search folders.
Keyword searches can also work well in enriched libraries, where clause curators include relevant keywords in the filename, description and/or legal comment.
To mitigate the downsides of keyword searches, ClauseBuddy will allow you to narrow down found clauses to specific folders.
You can do so by clicking on "Folder". You will then be presented with a list of all the folders that that contain (either themselves, or through one of their subfolders) at least one clause that contains the specified keywords. To narrow down your search results to a specific folder, you simply click on a folder's name. You will see the name of that folder appear as a filter on the right side.
Searching for keywords in the highly dynamic parts of a dynamic clause created in Clause9 may be unpredictable. For example, when you include 8 variations of the same sentence, searching for keywords found in different variations is possible, but unpredictable.
