DraftPilot Community Update - Plain English Drafting

Incorporating plain English drafting style guide + draft-a-clause now has more awareness of the definitions

We sponsored the Crafty Counsel Legal Tech Buyers Club conference last week.

I always love meeting current (and prospective!) users face-to-face. You always learn unexpected things.

So I was trying to be really open - and not just be in pitch mode the whole time!

How many branded items can a SaaS founder fit in a booth? 😂

Plain English drafting

One senior in-house lawyer from a large broadcaster came by our booth and asked whether our tool was trained on any style guides for plain English drafting. For example the one that Adobe’s legal team has open sourced (you can see it here).

She mentioned how critical it was to her team for drafting to be crisp, commercial and to-the-point.

And that if an AI tool is trained on historic contracts, it may in fact just (very efficiently!) be perpetuating old-school legalese bad habits...

Ouch!

The truth is, DraftPilot wasn’t explicitly trained on any plain-English-drafting style guides. So I didn’t have a very satisfactory answer. We had so far mostly focussed on ensuring the drafting was accurate, not necessarily how ‘plain English’ it was.

Until today!

Based on this feedback, we have now updated the “Generate Clause” and “Generate Pushback” tools to utilise plain English drafting principles.

In the below example you can see the difference for the same prompt: “I want an acceptance testing clause for a SaaS contract”.

I think it really shows that if trained correctly, AI can be a driver for more elegant drafting, not just more efficient drafting.

Side-by-side comparison

Awareness of definitions

Another gap was that our stand-alone ‘drafting tools’ like the above Generate-Clause feature, didn’t have as much contextual knowledge of the agreement.

If you run an “AI review” against a playbook it of course would be aware, but when you just asked it to generate a separate clause like in the example above, you’d have to manually check the definitions it used were correct.

We fixed that last week, so now all definitions it uses are actually from the agreement. Shout-out to Peter Duffy from Titans for giving us the idea for that!

Thanks for being here and until next time 😊,

Daniel

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Daniel van Binsbergen
CEO at DraftPilot