Why we are different

Almost all these solutions are template-based. Starting from a template Word-document, they allow you to insert placeholders for administrative information such as name, address, price, etc. The software will then automatically fill in those placeholders, and perhaps also allow you to remove text when necessary.

Form fillers have existed for many years and have deserved their place in the business world. They are very good at automatically generating price lists and quarterly reports that focus on numbers and calculations.

• Focus. Form fillers tend to be part of a broad solution, where drafting is just one of many functions.

• Shallow drafting. Form fillers are very good at filling in placeholders, but tend to be limited in making subtle or sophisticated changes to text.

• Static content. Most form fillers rely on the old drafting technology offered by Microsoft Word. While a great general-purpose tool for typing texts, Word’s engine was never designed for dynamic text generation for legal professionals.

• Real-time results. Most form fillers work behind the scenes: when the user requests to generate a document, the tool fills in the template’s placeholders, and produces a new text document. After waiting several seconds, users can then open the resulting document and inspect its contents.

• When to use. Form fillers are a great solution when your legal drafting requirements are small — e.g. when you mostly draft non-disclosure agreements or consumer contracts that are not truly negotiated — but you simultaneously require significant amounts of contract management functionality (e.g. scanning, archiving, cost/revenue calculations, automatic renewal alerts, etc).

• Notes & comments: attach jurisprudence, doctrine and other information to your clauses to provide further guidance to users.

Tip: be aware that the functionality of many form fillers tends to overlap with other software packages:

• Most legal case management software offer document automation solutions.

• Enterprise systems such as SAP and Microsoft Dynamics offer sophisticated reporting engines that, while primarily focused on numbers, can also generate simple contracts.

• The template-editing capabilities of Microsoft Word itself are not widely known, but will often be sufficient for simple legal documents

There are thousands of software modules that generate documents. They tend to be part of a larger solution, such as a file management system or enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

These products are strongly focused on the legal sector and offer specific features that, compared to generic form fillers, makes them more suitable for legal documents. For example, some of them subdivide templates into smaller segments, typically individual clauses, and may offer to separately store those clauses.

• Form filling. While going beyond template editors, form fillers remain primarily focused on filling placeholders. Legal reasoning is therefore of secondary importance, in order to make the software not too complicated.

• Paragraph-level editing. Legal form fillers target entire paragraphs when manipulating text. Subtle text changes remain difficult to implement, particularly when multiple levels of legal reasoning apply — e.g. hiding a cross-reference that is part of a sentence that is only shown in some situations.

• No deep legal reasoning. Legal form fillers do not allow clauses to participate in true legal reasoning — e.g. only inserting a sentence when a certain defined term is mentioned before; automatically generating definition lists; referring to the recital that happens to cover the liability cap.

• No automatic cleanup. Those legal form fillers that allow to separately store clauses, usually offer store those clauses as-is in their database. When a user retrieves the clause, some cleanup is likely required — e.g., to correct numbering, change legal terminology, adapt grammar, or remove interpunction.

• Limited to Q&A. Legal form fillers revolve around Q&A-style automation. While great for automating documents that are generated in high volumes, they only cover a portion of the documents produced by legal professionals. For other situations, intelligent document assembly is necessary.

Some software packages are dedicated to managing clause databases, usually as a standalone product. While partially similar to ClauseBase’s clause library, there are several differences:

• Focus. Dedicated clause databases are designed to facilitate storing and retrieving clauses. These “micro-tools” deliberately do not offer any functionality for composing entire documents, as is the case with ClauseBuddy's Smart Templates and Clause9's document assembly and Q&A style interviews.

• Target audience. Because they lack features to compose documents, dedicate clause databases are generally not intended to be used by business users. (Conversely, ClauseBuddy allow you to create Legal Guides / Playbooks in order to assist business users. Similarly, ClauseBuddy also allows you to use sophisticated Q&As created in Clause9, that provide helpful "guardrails" towards business users.)

• Reliability. In some products, users are expected to collect and insert clauses. Other products rely on artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically find clauses. While lowering the barrier, these "automatic" clause databases will also lead to significant noise, because AI does not “understand” content, and will therefore show many clauses that will be grammatically similar but not necessarily legally relevant. The noise will become particularly troublesome with languages other than English, and when the number of example clauses is low.

• No context. Automatic clause libraries will automatically extract clauses from existing documents, to allow you to quickly search for relevant clauses. While this is a very fast procedure (zero setup time for lawyers!), the results will completely lack context, so that lawyers not involved in the drafting process will have limited cues on the suitability of a clause, which is particularly troublesome for junior lawyers. In addition, the zero setup time has an enormous cost in the day-to-day practice, because lawyers will have to read & analyse every search result, over and over again, with each lookup — often requiring a few minutes to go through 50+ examples. For this reason, ClauseBuddy's Clause Hunt shows the full context of each clause, and allows you to easily stored found clauses in your "clean" clause library, together with filtrable attributes and helpful hints towards colleagues, so that future lookups can be done in seconds instead of minutes.

• GDPR compliance. Mass-feeding old contracts to (third party) solutions, without any manual scrubbing of personal/confidential data, can be difficult to reconcile with both general data security requirements and the data minimisation requirements of legislation such as the EU GDPR. While every customer will have to make its own assessment, ClauseBuddy mitigates compliance issues by offering you easy tools to segment old contracts into almost unlimited "silos", and even offers you the possibility to use your own private server, so nobody else — including the ClauseBase-team — can have access to your confidential data. Read more about the data protection pitfalls in this blog post from renowned data protection law firm Timelex.

• In-depth comparison. Read an in-depth analysis of why automatic clause databases are like legal fairy-tales.

These products are specialised in decision trees: tools to assist users with decision taking — e.g., for performing medical triages and financial calculations. In the legal sector, they can also model legal knowledge, such as assessing tax legislation compliance.

• Types of output. Decision trees offer many output types, from simple conclusions on the screen (“not compliant”), to emails, spreadsheets and reports. While they can also generate legal documents, these tools tend to be focused on combining static content, with limited text manipulation and layout options.

• Target audience. The legal industry is just one of the many sectors where they are used.

• When to use. Using decision trees for document generation is ideal when the legal decision complexity is much higher than the output complexity, i.e. when most of your time will be spent calculating the decision, and the resulting email/message/document tends to be regarded as a by-product of that decisions. Most contracts, memos and policy documents do not fit this scope.