Built from Inside the Associate Workflow
Clausearc exists because one M&A associate tracked exactly how much legal work wasn’t legal work.
31 Hours in a Single Month
Clara Holloway was a fourth-year M&A associate at a mid-size New York firm when she started keeping a log. For one month, she tracked every hour spent applying the firm’s negotiation playbook to incoming contracts — checking counterparty positions against the firm’s acceptable ranges, marking deviations, drafting the corresponding redlines.
The total came to 31 hours. Not drafting. Not advising. Not analyzing whether a provision made sense given the deal structure. Mechanical application of a document the firm already had.
The insight was narrow and specific: the playbook contained all the firm’s legal knowledge about acceptable contract positions. The bottleneck was that applying it still required a human to read every clause. That bottleneck was addressable.
Clara left the firm and brought the problem to Brett Oyelaran, a software engineer she’d met through the legal tech community. Brett had spent five years at iManage building DMS integrations for Am Law 200 firms. He understood both the technical architecture and the workflow friction that caused associates to abandon tools that weren’t native to their document management environment.
Their first prototype extracted clauses from an NDA and mapped them against a playbook. Two associates at the firm tested it. NDA review dropped from 90 minutes to 25 minutes per document.
Clausearc is now a full redline generation platform covering NDAs, MSAs, vendor agreements, and SOWs, with native integration into iManage and NetDocuments.
“The playbook contained all the firm’s legal knowledge about acceptable positions. The bottleneck was applying it required a full human read-through.”
Clara Holloway
CEO & Co-Founder, Clausearc
Return the Associate’s Day to Judgment Work
Return the associate’s contract review day to judgment work by handling the mechanical playbook application.
We are not building a general-purpose AI legal assistant. We are not trying to replace attorney judgment. We are solving one specific, well-bounded problem: the mechanical work of applying a firm’s existing playbook to incoming contracts takes hours per document and requires no legal reasoning. That work should not require a trained associate. Clausearc handles it so the associate’s time can go to the analysis that actually requires a lawyer.
Principles We Build By
Playbook Fidelity Over AI Creativity
Clausearc generates redlines based on your firm’s negotiation playbook, not on what an AI model thinks a contract should say. The output is traceable and explainable because it is grounded in your positions, not a language model’s priors.
Attorney Override Always Available
Every Clausearc suggestion is a starting point, not a decision. Attorneys accept, modify, or reject each redline. The platform surfaces the reasoning; the attorney makes the call. We do not make it difficult or require justification to override our suggestions.
Audit Trail on Every Suggestion
Each tracked change in the output document links to the playbook provision it was drawn from and the clause it responded to in the counterparty document. Attorneys, partners, and clients can trace any redline back to its source.
Narrow Scope, Done Completely
We cover playbook-driven review of NDAs, MSAs, vendor agreements, and SOWs. We do not claim to handle everything. We handle those contract types completely and reliably, with DMS integration that removes the workflow friction that kills adoption of standalone tools.