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Drafting Assistant Finds Precedent for You, Clause-by-Clause

By Casey C. Sullivan, Esq. on March 25, 2016 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

It just got a little easier for in-house and transactional attorneys to know if their legal documents meet current standards. Thomson Reuters's Drafting Assistant, the only end-to-end transactional drafting software solution in the world, just added a new "locate precedent" feature that allows you to compare your draft to similar documents, one clause at a time. (Disclosure: Thomson Reuters is FindLaw's parent company.)

That means greater confidence, quicker drafting, and many fewer errors sneaking through. That's great news for in-house attorneys.

Quickly Find Market Standards With Locate Precedent

Let's say you're putting together a Schedule 14A information for a proxy statement. All the major details are hammered out. But this section on executive compensation, does that look right? Does it meet the industry standard? Now, with Drafting Assistant's new Locate Precedent feature, it's easy to check.

Here's how it works. Drafting Assistant identifies similar documents taken from EDGAR filings -- that's a database of over 20 million SEC filings to work with, growing by more than 3,000 documents a day. Drafting Assistant then checks your language against matching documents. Those clauses are intelligently ranked for the specific agreement type and can be organized through a host of filters, including industry, date, jurisdiction, and law firm. You'll even get additional information from Practical Law's What's Market analyses.

The end result is a deeper understanding of latest market practices and greater confidence in your legal documents.

More Confidence in Less Time

The Locate Precedent feature isn't the only thing that makes Drafting Assistant helpful and exciting, however. Drafting Assistant helps reduce errors and cut proofreading time by analyzing your documents for inconsistencies, missing information, and errors.

With Drafting Assistant, you can spend a lot less time worrying about your legal documents. A Thomson Reuters nationwide study showed that Drafting Assistant reduced the time attorneys spent reviewing documents by 60 percent. Where attorneys were once spending over three hours cross-checking defined terms, Drafting Assistant reduced that time to 24 minutes. Time spent proofreading was reduced from 103 minutes to just 40, while time spent identifying numeration errors by 41 percent.

Frankly, we can't think of many things as valuable as less time spent drafting and more confidence in the results.

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