30 March 2025
Doc Chat
New major feature The former "DocAnswer" module has been replaced by the "Doc Chat" feature. This new module allows you to interactively "interrogate" your opened document — or one or more other PDF/DOCX files — with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In addition, you can also ask generic legal questions.
Doc Chat is "layout-aware". If its answer consists of texts that you will likely want to insert into your opened MS Word document, then those answers are shown in green, and can usually be inserted without any layout configuration necessary.
Multi-Document Table
New major feature In addition to chatting with a single document, we also introduced a module that allows you to extract information from multiple documents (PDF/DOCX) at once.
The new Multi-Document Table feature allows you to ask multiple questions about multiple documents at once. You then get back a table with the answer to each question for each of your documents, which you can then optionally export to an Excel-file or table in MS Word.
By hovering with your mouse over an answer (or one the numbered references next to a question), you can immediately see the relevant original paragraphs.
Bulk Operations
New major feature The new Bulk Operations module allows you to perform multiple operations simultaneously across one or more Word-files or PDF-files, in order to handle tedious editing tasks that would otherwise require many multiple mouse clicks — or even multiple hours.
For example, you can:
Bundle 16 different DOCX-files together into one single DOCX or PDF.
Create a table with all 635 paragraphs (across 23 long documents) that contain certain keywords.
Update the same paragraph with some payment term across twenty different templates.
Within fifteen different annexes, accepting all track changes, removing metadata, and making sure that all footers say "Execution Copy" instead of "For discussion purposes only".
More than 30 different operations are available, and we are actively thinking about yet other ones. You are highly encouraged to check out the extensive manual!
Automatically include new rights in profiles
New feature At ClauseBase, we very frequently add new functionality. However, not all customers want their users to automatically have access to all new features, because the pace of the introduced changes may be too high.
Such customers can set profiles to not automatically include new rights, i.e. to not automatically give access to newly introduced features.
Personal Truffle Hunt baskets
New feature In the New user defaults, you can now enable the option Person Truffle baskets. When activated, this will automatically create a personal basket under Truffle Hunt for each user.
Various AutoSuggest improvements
Improvement The AutoSuggest module now features the following improvements with respect to Quality Library clauses:
The contents of a clause can be directly edited through the edit button (assuming the end-user has sufficient rights to do so).
Through the "..." menu, users can get more information about the clause, such as the clause's internal number and last modification date.
When multiple "search folders" are available, the name of the search folder is being included at the left.
Users can switch to the relevant folder in the Quality Library's browser module, by clicking on the folder name.
Translations in the Quality Library (& AutoSuggest)
Improvement Temporary translations of clauses in the Quality Library can now be achieved through the wrench-icon. Previously, this was only available for Truffle Hunt clauses or by actually editing a quality library's clause.
Send entire clause to curator
Improvement ClauseBuddy's Send to curator feature was initially designed for submission speed, i.e. allow a user to send a potentially interesting clause to the curator with as little overhead as possible, and let the curator work out the details.
Over time, however, customer shave asked to also include a possibility for users to include all relevant details, so that interested end-users can convey clause details that the curator will then no longer have to figure out (e.g., a suggested location, title, attributes, etc.)
The Send to curator module therefore includes both options now: Minimal and Full.
Furthermore, upon submission of a new clause, the end-user will also get a warning when a clause already seems present in the clause library. This may help in avoiding unnessary clauses being sent to the curator.
Summarisation of other PDF/DOCX files
New feature In addition to summarising the currently opened DOCX-file, the Summarisation module now also allows to summarise entire PDF/DOCX-files that are uploaded.
Small administration improvements
Improvements The Truffle Hunt, Users management and Groups management modules now allow you to filter on the name of the user. This should help customers with many users to quickly find the relevant user.
In addition, the left & right panes can now be independently moved, and the active user is being shown with a darker background.
The access bundles settings now allow you to additionally inspect the personal access bundles (i.e. access bundles linked to one specific person). Previously, those access bundles were only accessible from Clause9.
Text compare improvements
Improvement When two blocks of text were very different from each other, but nevertheless shared a few words, then ClauseBuddy's comparison algorithm compared those texts anyway — often resulting in highly "fragmented" comparisons. From a technical perspective this was correct, but for human consumption this was often suboptimal.
A new algorithm was developed to avoid this fragmentation. Even when a few words are identical, the new algorithm only dives into actually comparing blocks of texts when they are truly comparable. In addition, there's a clear warning shown when the texts are simply too different to be interesting to compare.
Small ClauseBuddy improvements
Improvements The Strict? setting (for literal searches, instead of smart semantic searches) is now remembered across ClauseBuddy sessions.
When the user has activated track changes in MS Word, every insertion coming from ClauseBuddy would end up as a change. To avoid confusion, ClauseBuddy now disables Insert with changes in such situation, and shows a warning explaining why.
Because users increasingly process large PDF-files with ClauseBuddy, the PDF processing server is now upgraded to allow for faster PDF-processing. In addition, the maximum processing time (before an error is generated) is increased from max. 5 minutes to max. 15 minutes.
Clause9 improvements
Improvements A new setting "Allow rows to break across pages" was added to the table settings inside the Base styling.
The file usage dialog has been improved to help advanced users:
It is now shown at the right-side, so that you can continue to browser through files on the left side.
It includes a Refresh button that allows you to recalculate the usage after changes have been made.
You can keep a temporary checklist that allows you to track which usages you have inspected or changed.
You can directly edit one of the target files that is mentioned.
Subdocuments of a binder can now have a "Don't restart numbering" setting configured, which avoids that the numbering of headings would get restarted in that specific subdocument.
Based on a penetration testing recommendation, the password of a user can only be changed when the current password is also entered.
The @is-unique special function was added. It has an advanced use case, roughly equivalent to being the opposite of the @is-duplicate special function.
REST API additions
New feature The REST API was expanded with the following end-points:
/create_folder: specify folder name + parent folder ID, get back the new folder’s ID
/create_clause: create simple clauses through the API
/create_document: create simple documents through the API
/create_qna: create simple Q&As through the API
/create_qna_answerset: create a set of answers for a specified Q&A, and store it in a specified folder. Get back the answer set’s file ID
/qna_answerset: get the answers of an existing Q&A answerset
/qna_questions: get the essentials of each question in a Q&A (with questions being grouped per card)
/delete_file: to delete any folder, clause, document, Q&A or Q&A answerset.
Removed features
At ClauseBase, we're not afraid to admit that some features don't turn out the way we initially assumed they would. Accordingly, it sometimes also happens that features get removed:
The Bulk Import module allowed to upload a selection of documents (typically 1 to 10) and then have them analysed for interesting clauses. Clauses that would match across documents could be easily lined up and extracted. This feature assumed that legal professionals were interested in spending time on carefully selecting the best clauses from a list of slightly different versions found in their drafting history, and then in a second step curating them as part of their Quality Library. However, even though clause effectively discrepancies exist in virtually every organisation we worked with (so that lining up similar clauses should be a relevant exercise), our assumption about the importance of this process, was wrong. As this feature dated back from before the arrival of Truffle Hunt and GenAI, it has now been removed. Features that partially fulfil the same role include Truffle Hunt itself (i.e., automatic splitting of documents into clauses) and filtering Truffle Hunt clauses with AI in order to find the best clauses. Furthermore, the Quality Library now also incorporates features that warn if similar clauses get added.
The Explain feature (one of our earliest Generative AI modules) allowed to explain selected text. As exactly the same functionality can be achieved through the new Doc Chat functionality, it has been removed.
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