Organizations are cutting back on legal spend. A survey conducted by the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), a global bar association with 33,000 in-house counsel members, reveals that in-house attorneys are cutting back on outside legal services and are bringing more work in-house. With a reduction in outside spending comes a need for access to more economical legal resources. Companies’ legal departments need access so that they can effectively tackle the increase in workflow brought in-house, and outside counsel need access to maintain a competitive advantage by reducing the cost of their services and to stay ahead of emerging trends in the law. And all of this needs to be accomplished in an efficient manner.
What is Ideal Draft?
Idealdraft is a crowdsourcing tech for legal documents and related content. It is a tool for lawyers, businesses and anyone else who might need access to and a better understanding of legal documents. But unlike other legal platform, it doesn’t aim to substitute lawyers. Instead, they want to is lower the cost of drafting, and lessen time spent understanding, legal documents.
We built this platform by extracting documents that are required to be filed publicly under U.S. security laws. We implemented a cutting-edge information retrieval software library that is robust and flexible, which provides search functionality that is unlike that of any of our competitors. The platform gives the users ability to contribute content by uploading form documents that are not otherwise available on the Internet. Further, we enabled anyone to revise and annotate content on the site. This gives legally sophisticated users the ability to demonstrate, and those who aren’t legally sophisticated a way to develop, a deeper understanding of issues that are embedded in legal documents. All of these features help narrow the knowledge gap between lawyers and non-lawyers, an important benefit for the industry.
Industry Leading Features
Part of our mission is to create a tool to help people draft the ideal legal document or clause. To achieve that, we built rich features that promote collaboration, foster a deeper understanding of the law, and ensure accountability.
SEC Document Extraction
We have built a database that allows for the sharing of legal documents, clauses and other useful content. Content on idealdraft was built by extracting documents from the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) EDGAR database.
Line by Line Annotation
The ability to annotate content has been utilized by a variety of sites. But none of these sites were built for the annotation of legal documents. Line-by-line annotation of legal documents is very useful because language therein is often convoluted and complex..
Advance Search
Finding Legal resources has always been a pain for lawyers. We have developed a state of the search algorithm that lets our users find documents based on variety of search criterias. It is not only fast but comprehensive, utilizing tags and our ranking system to find the best possible results.
Semantic Tagging
The use of tags on a legal resource sites is not widespread, but it should be. Tags are extremely important for legal content because they can highlight issues that are not otherwise searchable with traditional keyword search. Further, if a user is interested in a specific legal issue, he could subscribe to and/or follow the tag related to that issue. This automatically brings all related content to him.
Interactive News Feeds
Newsfeeds are helpful because they bring relevant content to users. They create a sense of community, and they keep users engaged and promote responsiveness. But despite all of these benefits, legal resource sites have yet to implement interactive feeds on their platforms. We are the first. Our interactive newsfeed allows a user to follow idealdraft content they find most useful.
Redline/Revision of content
Any user can revise content, including documents and clauses, with a simple click of a button. We have implemented several features that help users understand the reasoning for these revisions. Once content is revised and saved to our database, we automatically generate a redline that compares the revised content against the original content, that can be annotated as well.
IdealDraft is product of synergy between technology and legal expertise, providing an innovative solution that narrows the knowledge gap propelling the legal industry forward.
Interested in exploring a similar partnership?
We love building software at scale! If you have an idea like this, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’ll be happy to work with you to bring it to reality.