Belgium-based document automation company, ClauseBase, has recently initiated a considerable enhancement of its platform. The aim is to embed multiple additional capabilities, including clause extraction, AI-powered document review, and automated proofreading, into Microsoft Word. This broadened feature set is intended to provide an inclusive platform for contract drafting, reviewing, and negotiating. Read more about it here.
Having kicked off operations in 2018, ClauseBase started out as a contract drafting platform. The idea was to empower lawyers to convert their clauses into substantial and reusable segments to effectively manage them in a clause library. Such an approach would facilitate the usage of these clauses as building blocks, maintaining the consistency of terminology, grammar, style, cross-referencing, and other aspects.
The company has two primary offerings. Clause9, launched in 2018, is their original document automation software. On the other hand, ClauseBuddy, which was introduced in 2022, operates as an AI-driven drafting toolbox that works as a plug-in within Microsoft Word and Outlook.
This new expansion gives the company the status of a one-stop solution for legal drafting. The additional features include:
- Clause extraction from drafting history. The new clause extraction technology from ClauseBase allows law firms and legal departments to efficiently comb through their drafting history, extract clauses, and repurpose them with ease. This technology also integrates with the SEC’s EDGAR database to provide millions of sample clauses readily.
- AI-powered document reviewing. Lawyers can now quickly execute a red flag analysis of any third-party document, identify potential issues, and suggest improvements, all thanks to generative AI provided by ClauseBase. Thus, lawyers can tailor their review preferences rather than only relying on LLM-driven reviewing.
- Automated definitions and proofreading. This feature allows for scanning legal documents for typical errors like broken cross-references and inconsistencies. Though this feature’s functionality is not groundbreaking, ClauseBase has made a significant stride by incorporating it into a comprehensive set of legal drafting tools.
According to Maarten Truyens, founder and CEO at ClauseBase, “We are former lawyers at ClauseBase; legal drafting was 90% or more of what we did in our previous lives. Our goal has always been to bring back joy to this crucial but broken process. While we started with document automation in 2018, we quickly realized this was only one piece of the legal drafting puzzle and we have been hard at working developing our Microsoft Word plugin ClauseBuddy into an assistant that helps with all the annoying and time-consuming parts of the work.”
It’s also important to mention that ClauseBase was a finalist in the 2021 Startup Alley at ABA Techshow, which is a further testament to their innovative approach to streamlining the legal drafting process.