Affordable In-house lawyer tech (poor man's LegalTech)
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As an often budget-constrained in-house lawyer who nonetheless (a) wants to do the best job I can and (b) is a bit lazy about what I perceived to be drudgery-type stuff, I have over the years picked up a number of free/already provided with some other package/cheap bits of functionality that I'm sharing here - hopefully to the benefit of others in the same boat.
Absolutely can't live without it.
I started using it because I had a Mac, which doesn’t have as extensive clipboard functionality as a PC. It allows you to create snippets of text that magically expand when you enter the preset abbreviation (I think everyone uses ‘w/’ to mean ‘with’ at some point in their lives.) The applications for in-house lawyers are myriad – how many times do you find yourself typing ‘[My company], company registration number [xxxxx], a company incorporated and registered in [England and Wales], having its registered address at [address]’ – or copying it from somewhere else? With TextExpander you set a ‘snippet’ and an abbreviation like ‘myco’, and then you just need to type ‘myco’ for the whole lot to pop up 🪄 (BTW, for me, that’s ‘em/wand’ 😉). You can instal a keyboard onto your phone that uses the same abbreviations.
It does other things, like date and time calculations and fill-ins, for when you’re feeling flash.
If your business buys into the tool, you can use it as a poor man’s clause bank as you can share snippets amongst your team.
All from $3.33 USD per user per month. Bless it and all who created it.
ClickUp is a quite awesomely powerful piece of project management kit that is available for free.
Of course it works best if you get the team working together on it (which I'm guessing the good folks at ClickUp are aware of as it becomes chargeable at that point 😂) and IMHO it's worth it for a small team, if you can't muster dedicated LegalTech. However, even the free version helps you track all of your myriad projects, including setting yourself reminders - and it includes email integration which helps (somewhat) with the 'I'm sure sent an email on this - you were copied, what did I say?' and 'why did we agree to this clause 8 months ago?' questions.
RobinAI - proper LegalTech for free!
I don't know how long they will keep it up, but the amazing folks at RobinAI have made a version of their software available free of charge.
Like most legal AI offerings, it does summaries to order (the first suggested use is 'Draft an email to the CEO explaining the key points of this contract') TBH I don't find these particularly useful on this app or any other, but might be helpful for simple contracts. The clause-by-clause summary function is more helpful (e.g. 'where is the liability clause' points you at the liability clause and provides a summary, which is sufficiently detailed to be useful).
What it does do really quite well is the generative AI piece (e.g. 'draft me a liability clause'.) It's a lot less prolix than other offerings I have seen - you will probably want to polish its offering but it gives you something quite decent to work from.
It also has playbook functionality, which I think is really important - almost every in-house legal team has an individualised set of risk positions and worry beads.
The 'check defined terms' piece is really nice - this seems to be quite a standard bit of kit in #legaltech Word plugins, and generally works quite well. If there is a lot of drafting effort in an agreement, it's easy for defined terms to become obsolete, and/or to mutate throughout the agreement and RobinAI has a user-friendly interface for pointing these out and suggesting corrections.
The RobinAI team is constantly working on upgrading their offering too.
And I've seen that there is a free database of legal clauses on their website! Go RobinAI!
Everyone's favourite! MS Word - Automatic cross referencing and Styles
I must admit I was dithering about this one… one of those ‘surely everyone knows’ jobs, but as I’ve just received a draft where someone obviously didn’t know – here goes!
Microsoft Word has a number of features that are super useful in managing documents that are a bit complex – as contracts will tend to be.
Automatic cross referencing (you know, blah blah provision ‘as set out in clause 12’) – if you insert a new clause 5, clause 12 is now clause 13 and it throws everything out 🤯 Which is why sometimes (not very often any more) you’ll see legal documents with a clause saying ‘[Not used]’.
My point 1 is – if you come across a wonky cross reference, please, pleasey please please please don’t immediately scratch it out and replace it with a hard-coded number. This will likely naff up someone else’s careful cross-referencing efforts. First (please!) try highlighting it and pressing F9. Chances are it will magically refresh to the right number. If you would like to refresh everything in the document, you can do Ctrl-a then F9.
Point 2 -if you would like to try it – it’s easy 😎 Stick the cursor where you would like your cross-reference, go to the ‘Insert’ ribbon at the top of the screen and select ‘cross-reference’. You will get a drop down of all of the numbered bits and pieces in your agreement.
You can see if text is hard-text or a field by highlighting it (you can highlight a chunk of text including the relevant bit and the bit you're interested will be darker grey, if it's a field). Or if you're feeling flash you can go File- Options - Advanced - Show document content - Field shading (dropdown) Always
MS Word again! Converting pdfs
The scenario:
You've been sent a contract - as a pdf (illustration of this scenario below😒)
You need to make some changes
You don't have Adobe Writer
BUT If you have Microsoft Word, you can
Save the pdf
Open Word
Open the pdf from Word, and Word will automatically convert it for you 🎉 It generally doesn't make a terrible job of the formatting either.
