In this latest TalkingTech product demonstration, Legal IT Insider’s editor Caroline Hill sat down with Dr. Caspar Roxburgh, product lead at Draftable, to walk through some new features now available in Draftable Legal.
Draftable Legal was launched in 2023 in response to demand from the legal market for more choice in document comparison solutions. Draftable has provided document comparison for well over a decade, but the last two years has seen the evolution of the Draftable product stack specifically for law firms, built in consultation with firms such as Allens in Australia.
Roxburgh, who joined Draftable in 2022 after a varied career in the AI and data analytics space, talked us through the new Departures Table functionality, which enables lawyers to create a table from a redline document. He also showed us the new Redline in Email feature, with which you can compare the body of text in emails in Outlook, which can be a painful and manual process.
Draftable is a desktop application with the ability to generate output straight into Microsoft Word, to avoid context switching.
The Departures Table come as a Word document that you can put in your house style and that quickly shows changes across a document, enabling you to communicate them to clients more easily. Roxburgh said: “It’s very easy for someone who is not looking at the redline too see the change in the context and understand which part of the document has been impacted, which is what make it so powerful.
“This is an easy thing to review instead of having to go through all the red lines and the cool thing is that you can leave notes and tags as well.”
The idea came directly from Australian firm Allens, whose associates were spending up to five hours manually compiling summaries from redline documents.
The Redline in Email feature is a result of the fact that law firms struggle to stay on top of changes made in the body of an email in Outlook, with Roxburgh commenting: “Firms were coming to us and saying ‘we need something in Outlook because we’re doing this back and forth and have no way of tracking it.” A command in Draftable will compare the emails and also enable you to accept or reject changes in the body of the email.
Roxburgh adds: “Speaking with CIOs at major firms across the globe, when we show this tool to them their response is often, ‘I’ve been looking for something like this because it’s a really common workflow and at the moment it’s just like the Wild West.”
In questions, we discussed whether it’s fair that people commonly assume that legal comparison tools will be subsumed by general AI tools. You can watch the full replay here: https://youtu.be/tjshDY64uDg
TalkingTech Product Demonstrations form part of Legal IT Insider’s commercial offering, to find out more please contact [email protected] or [email protected] for more information.