27 April 2025

Interactively changing clause levels

New feature ClauseBuddy now allows users to interactively change the "level" that text gets inserted into a Word-file. This avoids that users would have manually change the numbering by altering the DOCX-file.

By default, text gets inserted at the top-level (level 1), which will result in a clause with number 10 in the screenshot below.

Immediately after insertion, while the insertion-menu is still visible in ClauseBuddy, users can now changing this level. For example, when changing to level 2 (simply by clicking on the number), the numbering of the inserted article will get changed to 9.7

Users can also interactively toggle the title through the popup-menu.

Also interesting to note:

• This interactivity also works for text inserted with "track changes" enabled.

• Users can also interactively change whether footnotes and cross-references must be inserted.

• Due to technical limitations, it is not possible to replace previously inserted text when using ClauseBuddy in Outlook. Accordingly, with every level change, additional text will be inserted, so users will have to manually remove previously inserted text.

Bilateral company registry connections

Improvement For Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, we now directly connect to the national company registries in order to do lookups for names, addresses and company numbers.

While we still use a centralised cross-jurisdiction third party service for all other countries, we are gradually connecting directly to national registries. The primary reason is that the cross-jurisdiction services are often slow to update and are more prone to errors.

Additionally, these cross-jurisdiction services do not take into account all the specifics of certain countries. For example, for Belgium, companies may have different street names and entity type names in Brussels, so the same company would be shown differently in French & Dutch:

When a Q&A would be set to French or English, the company would be shown as follows:

... but if the Q&A would be set to Dutch, the very same company would be shown as:

Caching of converted PDF-files

Improvement Users are increasingly uploading PDF-files in different modules of ClauseBuddy. Unfortunately, the conversion of PDF-files to DOCX can take quite a while (often up to a minute), which is particularly impacting the user's experience when the same PDF-file gets uploaded multiple times, e.g. in different modules of ClauseBuddy or at different times throughout the day.

We therefore added a caching layer. Converted PDF-files will be stored at ClauseBase's servers for 8 hours, so that they do not need to converted when used again within this time period.

Improvements to Multi-Document Table

Improvements Several changes were made to this increasingly popular module.

The feature to "constrain" answers was relabelled to "multiple choice", as this was how most users perceived it.

Furthermore, different choices will now have customisable colour coding, so it will be immediately clear to which predefined category a certain answer belongs:

For example, when specifying the following options for "Applicable law":

The results table will show:

Answers can also be edited afterwards, e.g. to make small corrections during a quick review phase.

The question type of existing questions can be changed afterwards (except when predefined options were inserted already).

For multilingual contexts, the language in which answers must be formulated, can now be specified upfront.

Additional instructions can be communicated towards the LLM, e.g. to specify how results must be formulated.

Improvements to Doc Chat

Improvements Several changes were made to this module.

First, upon popular request, multiple documents can now be uploaded at once, so users can interrogate them simultaneously.

Users can also export the chat session (answers & questions) to a Word-file, if desired with a customised layout.

Third, interactive notes (circled numbers) will appear with relevant references to the paragraphs in the document (opened DOCX-file or uploaded DOCX/PDF file) that were used by the Artificial Intelligence engine to formulate its answer.

Recently used modules

Improvement In ClauseBuddy, the navigation menu now shows the four most recently modules, to allow users to easily switch back-and-forth between frequently used modules.

Clause9: identifiers panel

New feature The new Identifiers pane allows you to get a centralised overview of all the identifiers that are assigned to cards and questions. While you can go to each individual card and question and check/assign its identifier, this will be inefficient when you are dealing with a large number of identifiers.

Clause9: launch other Q&As

New feature Clause9 now allows you to launch one or more Q&As from within the current Q&A, typically for scenarios where multiple documents are closely linked and you want to reuse answers from one Q&A in a subsequent Q&A.

For example, for corporate law, you may want to create an initial set of questions, and then create launch buttons to create a shareholder agreement, a set of bylaws, some governmental forms that must be completed, etc. The answers from the initial Q&A will then be copied into all those other Q&As.

@float, @int and @cache special functions

Special functions to convert text to floating-point numbers or plain numbers were added.

In addition, in very specialised circumstances with heavy processing being done inside the browser, calculations can be cached through the @cache special function.

API: exporting documents as webhooks

Improvement The API now allows to create dynamic export-buttons that can export the current Q&A's document as HTML, DOCX or PDF. In the exported data, the e-signing position of signature boxes can be optionally specified.