Breaking down
the fine print
Years of contract work, locked in a digital filing cabinet. We turned it into a searchable clause library — and then a drafting machine.
Nobody drafts from scratch
Lawyers write a lot of contracts, and they end up rewriting the same clauses over and over. General Legal was sitting on a goldmine of past deliverables — scattered, unorganized, and completely unsearchable.
Finding one clause sample meant a manual treasure hunt. Redundant work was the norm and years of hard-won language sat idle in a digital filing cabinet.
They didn't need a search bar. They needed an intelligent reading assistant — because legal teams don't draft entire contracts, they build them clause by clause. So we built for the clause, not the document.
The clause deconstructor
Three moves, each one useless without the other two: take the archive apart, make every piece findable, then let the found pieces write the next draft.
The pipeline
Historical contracts broken into individual clauses, then tagged and categorized automatically — with the model proposing the taxonomy, since there was no seed data to inherit.
Ingest · Parse · TagThe search app
A sleek internal portal where lawyers find the exact clause they mean by describing it — dense vector search over the whole archive, behind their existing single sign-on.
Semantic searchThe generator
Not a chatbot. Search the clauses you like, tick a few boxes, hit Generate — a fresh, context-aware draft grounded in the firm's own precedent. AI with training wheels, on purpose.
Guided UIThe hard part was teaching a pipeline to read like a lawyer. Contracts are wildly inconsistent — nested lists, erratic numbering, formatting from three decades of habits. Off-the-shelf connectors are one-file-in, one-document-out. We wrote a pipeline that ingests one document, works out where each clause starts and stops, and emits dozens of clean records.
Not a vendor. An external innovation lab.
This was a fast, startup-style R&D engagement. Instead of holding a static plan hostage, we met weekly, traded ideas, and iterated through multiple working prototypes until one clearly fit how their lawyers actually work.
We also keep our eyes open for our partners. Mid-project we spotted a security vulnerability that left them exposed to a supply chain attack. We didn't wait for an SOW amendment — we helped them patch it.
What started as a proof of concept changed how General Legal sees its own data. Manual search is obsolete, the archive is richly structured, and the MCP layer means this library feeds their internal AI ecosystem for years — not just one app.
"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" — Daft Punk. Manual drafting, turned into an assembly line: precise, mechanical, infinitely repeatable.