We are beyond excited to announce that ClauseBuddy – ClauseBase’s AI-powered Word add-in assistant for legal drafting – now features layout awareness.
For lawyers, this means another step closer to eliminating the battle with MS Word’s styling functionalities.
The background
When lawyers draft contracts, they typically search through precedents for useful clauses. Usually, these precedents have different formatting and styling settings. When clauses are pasted into a document, lawyers still have to wrangle these settings and the document sometimes “breaks” as a result.
ClauseBuddy’s various clause libraries already made it easier to quickly find the right clause from a collection of potentially hundreds of thousands of clauses. Helping lawyers seamlessly fit those clauses into a document, however, was not yet a solved problem, because in practice most Word-files contain very poor layouts (technically speaking, of course!). This meant that ClauseBuddy’s auto-styling only worked for documents that already had a clean style.
What this means
ClauseBuddy becoming layout aware unlocks a wide range of boring but highly useful use cases that, up until now, either weren’t possible or only occasionally worked well:
Drafting a clause from scratch that will mimic the layout of the opened document
AI-powered redrafting of existing clauses, while keeping the layout intact
Full-document AI-powered redrafting
While some competing tools — including Microsoft’s own Copilot for MS Word — offer somewhat similar functionality, none of them are able to respect and preserve the existing formatting of a document. This makes them effectively useless for the purpose of redrafting a full document, as the time saved on manually making these changes was immediately reinvested in fixing the style of the output.
The technical details – why is this a big deal?
Superficial integrations with MS Word are fairly easy to accomplish, because Microsoft exposes an API for all MS Word add-ins, like ClauseBuddy.
However, that API is far from being complete, and has remained largely stuck at the surface-level, despite long-standing promises from Microsoft. Particularly in the area of styling and numbering, Microsoft exposes only very limited controls to developers, assuming that it's not so important after all.
That's probably OK for average audiences that do not care so much about styling, or only deal with light documents to process. Lawyers are a completely different audience, and care deeply about layout and numbering, even though most "real-life" legal documents have pretty bad styling from a technical perspective.
Almost without exception, legal tech vendors limit themselves to the few styling-related controls that Microsoft exposes through the add-in API. Going deeper than the standard controls offered by Microsoft is not for the faint of heart, so almost no vendor dares to go there.
ClauseBase went the extra mile, however, and cracked the bullet, effectively implementing all relevant parts of the ISO standard for DOCX. Combined with AI-techniques for in-document learning and clever heuristics, ClauseBuddy is now layout-aware, so that clauses can usually be inserted and rewritten with correct numbering, without losing styling, and without breaking existing cross-references – something that not even MS Word’s own native Copilot is capable of doing.
