Smarter Drafter set a lofty challenge for itself: “automate legal documents so that the result is no different, character-by-character, to what an expert human lawyer at a top-tier law firm would produce working manually”. This required handling an enormous amount of conditionality: extracting detailed information about the facts of the matter, applying partner-level legal knowledge and making all of the same drafting decisions that an expert human lawyer would make in customizing the content.

Law firms maintain precedents but they are static documents, loaded with square brackets and never entirely complete. The challenges of adapting the language for singular/plural (eg, “the Borrower acknowledges and agrees” vs “the Borrowers acknowledge and agree” and gender (himself/herself, etc) were just the beginning. They scoured the Internet, trying every document automation tool available and found nothing that could handle this level of conditionality in a scalable way. That’s when Rulestar came to the fore.

The solution required a new type of document automation system in which:

• the logical rules that control the slices of conditional content in the document are stored separately from the document content, to avoid the document becoming an unwieldy mess; and
• each logical rule only needs to be defined once (ie, rather than repeated for every slice that shares the same logic, which is a weakness of even the leading incumbent tools).

Rulestar’s unique system of “Named Ranges” provided the solution: by storing the logical rules separately from the document content, and defining each rule only once, it became possible to handle many more times the number of slices of conditional content. You can see this in action in Smarter Drafter’s automated Business Sale Agreement, which contains 2,768 slices of conditional content, and learn more about Named Ranges in our Knowledge Base.

By leveraging Rulestar’s next-generation automation platform, Smarter Drafter has taken legal document automation to an entirely new and unprecedented level, freeing more than 1,000 lawyers at 200+ law firms from hacking at static precedents. Smarter Drafter has put top-tier, partner-level expertise in their hands, enabling them to produce higher quality work more efficiently and profitably.

With a growing range of 90+ sophisticated legal documents automated, and more than 30,000 documents generated so far, Smarter Drafter’s success is resounding proof of the power of the Rulestar platform.