When starting a new deal document, do you often just start from the last bit of work that was similar? Whether that be the most recent file or the template in your firm’s DMS. The natural instinct is to start from what you know.

Your last deal is the work you trust. It’s already been through the rigour, negotiations, has the mark of approval. But all that knowledge is spread across every deal you've signed in the last few years, in the version of the indemnity clause you finally got right on matter four, the drafting on the NDA that held up under negotiation, the definitions that stopped drifting once someone fixed them. Building a template from it takes time.

Pull up the last three engagement letters. Read them side by side. Find where the wording changed and work out which version is the one you'd want to use next time. Reconcile the definitions that don't quite match. Do that clause by clause, across a document that might run to forty sections, and you've spent a day getting to something a fresher associate would call “the template,” even though nobody signed off on it as one.

In most firms this belongs to the Knowledge Management team, and in most firms, it sits on a list. Nobody argues with the value. It's that a template is never due, and client work always is. So, it slips a place each week, while everyone carries on starting from the last deal.

Curate does coalition in minutes. It reads the executed documents and lays the same clause side by side across all of them, so the variations are in front of you rather than hidden and buried in multiple docs.  Leaving you to simply make the calls on what clauses stays, what goes, what is amended and finish with a clean up-to-date template your firm can work from straight away.

 How Curate works

• Upload up to 20 deal documents: The deals you'd want the next one to look like. You choose what goes in. Curate works from the files you give it, nothing else.

• Curate reads your documents and surfaces where clauses and provisions are similar, but different: The same position drafted three different ways, the term that has interchanged between matters, the same provision that is shorter than the other ones. This previously manual comparison is done in front of you in minutes.

• You make the judgement: Go clause by clause. Take Curate's synthesis, keep the original wording, or rewrite it yourself. The lawyer decides. Nothing enters your template until you approve it.

• Finish with one clean, formatted template: It stands alone as your reference, or feeds straight into Automate.

Why the lawyer stays in the loop

With rapidly developing AI tools and assistants, the need for accuracy has never been greater. Sure, you can produce things in less time than before, but is it up to your firm standard?

You can set Curate up to work from documents your firm has already signed off on – house styling, formatting, standards etc. are all determined already. So, when it comes to drafting a template, you’re simply deciding between what stays and goes, clause by clause, between already approved work.

 The AI's job is to make the comparison fast. The approval is still yours.

That also means you don't need to give anything up to use it. Keep the AI tools you already have. Curate just gives them your own approved work to draw on instead of a blank page.

What it protects

Curate acts only on the files you upload. It doesn't crawl your document management system and it doesn't search for anything you haven't handed it directly. Your executed deals stay yours and are never used to train a shared model. Every clause that reaches the template is one a lawyer approved and stays within a closed circuit.

How it works with Automate

Curate is the capture layer. It turns signed deals into a template. Automate by Avvoka is what leading firms already run their drafting on: it takes a governed template and scales it to thousands of bespoke documents, through to signature, with almost no manual effort.

You don't need an existing template library to start with either. If you have one, Automate uses it. If you don't, Curate builds it from the deals you've already signed, so the first template you automate is drawn from your own work rather than assembled from scratch.

The knowledge was never missing. It was locked in documents nobody had time to take apart by hand. Curate is what takes them apart, so a lawyer can decide what belongs in the next one.