Spellbook, an early pioneer in legal genAI applications, has launched Benchmarks, an ‘at-a-glance’ tool that helps lawyers to quickly spot where contracts may be ‘off base from market standards, or your own custom standards’.
Scott Stevenson, CEO at Spellbook, commented: ‘Commercial lawyers constantly find themselves asking: ‘What’s market?’’ He added that this was all about lawyers moving into ‘an era of data-driven negotiation’. I.e. where contracts are finalised based on one’s ability to tap legal data that is fed instantly into the process.
Now, the idea of automatically checking key clauses in a contract against a playbook, or the wider market’s expectations, is something others have also developed. However, it’s a useful addition to what Spellbook already does in relation to their contract drafting and review capabilities.
All well and good, so what does it do? Here’s how the company explains things:
- ‘Check Contracts Against Standards: automatically checks your document’s term coverage against a standard for your contract type. Think of it like a top-to-bottom health check that helps you spot and close gaps in your contracts.
- Spellbook’s Standards Library: Choose from a comprehensive library of standards for common contract scenarios or let Spellbook suggest one for you. Our powerful matching algorithm is trained on a proprietary set of contracts and precedents – automatically matching your contract with the most relevant standards.
- Create and Customize Standards – Edit existing standards, or create your own by uploading a gold standard template or playbook. Spellbook will auto-generate a custom standard for you with topics and rules you can edit – and you can even add your own rules for added customization.
- Designed for Legal Teams: All standards in Spellbook are shared with your teammates – even if edits are made to their topics and rules. You can easily view and select standards recently used by your team to make reviews consistent across your firm.’
Well, you know how much this site likes standards – albeit with some flexibility! – so, this looks like a handy feature for users of the Spellbook product. Plus, the part about how its ‘algorithm is trained on a proprietary set of contracts and precedents – automatically matching your contract with the most relevant standards’ highlights once again the importance of curated legal data, and then the ability to leverage it with genAI tools.
I.e. the key word here is ‘proprietary’, in that Spellbook is not saying: ‘Hey, we just ran this over some random stuff we found on the web.’ It’s a collection of contract data that they feel is representative of ‘what’s market’ and so you can rely upon it when you come to draft and review a document. And if you can rely upon it, then you can move more rapidly in your work. Knowledge is power, as they say.