DraftPilot Community Update
Huge speed improvement + beta testing
Hi all!
Some updates on what we’ve been up to:
Lows:
We recently completed a number of customer discovery calls, and it became clear that we underestimated the variety of playbooks that users may need.
Our initial plan was to provide a few templates for users to edit (e.g. NDA/ vendor contracts), but we've realised that this won't be sufficient given the wide range of agreement types out there.
To address this, we've decided to prioritize the development of our AI playbook builder feature, which will delay our launch by a few weeks. More on that in the "What's next" section below.
Highs:
Over the past three weeks, our main focus has been on making the tool faster.
It just felt like other tools on the market were faster, and whilst ours seems (at least for the moment!) to be more accurate, it sucks to have to wait 1-2 minutes to see the AI’s results.
We could of course rationalise the wait: ‘it may save more than an hour in legal work, so 1-2 minutes is fine’. But in practice, I think as a species we’re just not used to waiting for anything anymore! So to compete, DraftPilot needs to be quick too.
We set out to reduce waiting time by 50%, but amazingly we were able to shave off nearly 80%!
Previously, it took around 1.5 minutes for the tool to review a 20-page contract against 15 playbook entries (with roughly 45 'positions' to check). Now, it only takes 20 seconds:
New DraftPilot speed - Watch Video
One reason for the improvement is that we figured out how to run a lot of the AI’s analysis in parallel, instead of in sequence. So we’re basically sending out 15 API calls to OpenAI at the same time.
The slightly scary thing is that we actually can’t take all the credit for the speed improvement. A whopping 50% of the speed increase is due to OpenAI releasing their new GPT4-o model. Which really makes you think doesn’t it?
If the underlying AI models improve faster than the software companies can.. then AI businesses like DraftPilot can likely not build a long term ‘technical’ competitive advantage.
So it all then comes down to how intuitive the tool is, how easy it is to get started with it, and how smoothly it fits into the lawyer's workflow. So I think it validates that this has been our main focus in designing the tool.
What's next:
We're prioritising the use of DraftPilot for creating mark-ups of third-party paper (i.e not your own template, but whatever doc you get from your counterparty). Just feels like the most painful part of contract reviews.
We’ll get to ‘own template’ mark-ups, but that’s probably a month or two away.
To help you create personalised playbooks, we are currently working on an AI playbook builder tool, with two different ways to create a draft playbook in seconds:
AI generated playbook with minimal input: This will enable you to get the AI to generate a first draft playbook for any contract type in 30 seconds, based on minimal inputs (you can then edit it however you like). It’ll basically take the positions that the AI thinks are common for that kind of contract.
Use your own template, to inform your third party paper playbook:
This is a bit of a twist, but if you happen to have your own template for a specific contract type (e.g. you have standard purchasing terms, even though in practice you often end up reviewing your vendor’s contract) we want to enable you to use that template.
So you’ll paste it into the tool, and the AI will extract the positions taken in that template as a starting point for setting out your preferred positions in the third-party paper playbook.
It will hopefully also add your sample wording from your template to the playbook, so that if you are reviewing a counterparty document and a clause is missing entirely, then the AI will base its drafting suggestions on how you word that clause in your own template.
I apologise if the above is a bit confusing, but don’t really know how to explain it better! Hopefully next update I can show instead of tell.
Beta testing:
We're now ready to offer beta testing to 5 in-house lawyers, so if you're an in-house lawyer and are interested, please hit reply.
This is what it involves:
A free 3-month license to DraftPilot for you and your team
A 30-minute intro call with me to show you around the product
Monthly 30-minute calls to share feedback and feature requests
Thanks for being here and until next time 😊,
Daniel
CEO at DraftPilot.ai