First Product Update
Medium posts as a way to keep you up-to-date about all the improvements we’re making.
(You can skip to the “What’s New” below, if you’re in a rush)
When we test-launched Donna a few months ago we never expected the amount of feedback and love that lawyers would give us. Although the early app was horrible to use, it became clear that Donna was solving a very real pain.
So since launch we’ve been working with some of the world’s smartest lawyers on making Donna someone that they really love to work with. We’ve iterated through hundred’s of ideas to design the perfect workflow for the future lawyer.
During that process we’ve been making dozens of small improvements a day to the app. And even a few major redesigns. The rate of innovation is so high that sending out product updates is impossible. We don’t want to flood our user’s inboxes with more emails, lawyers have to deal with those too much already (don’t worry, we’ll fix this soon too).
But in speaking with our users we realised that most of our early fans were still stuck on an old version of the app, or unaware that we had solved many of their frustrations with recent updates. And although they were still using Donna, we realised that a Product Update, now and then, could be a good thing.
That’s why we decided to try posting our product updates as Medium posts instead. That way we don’t have to constantly spam people (you can subscribe yourself), and you can also read back through all the improvements when it’s convenient for you to do so.
What’s New
Fewer False-Positives
We quickly learned that more important than finding all the issues, is finding only important and real issues. So we spent a lot of time optimising our AI models to limit so called false-positives.
Donna’s distinguishing feature is her ability to learn from you deciding how to resolve issues. So if you choose to ignore a certain issue Donna can now learn from this information. The more you work with her the further she can lower the amount of false-positives.
And this feedback data is unique for your Donna. We never share your data with others…ever…period! You can however choose to make this model available to other lawyers in your firm by explicitly inviting them in the dashboard (https://app.donna.legal).
Word Integration
Sorry macOS users, this one is only for Windows 😢
We now have a easy integration with Microsoft word. Just press the Donna button to instantly open your current Word document in Donna.
The word plugin will also give a very occasional notification if it sees that your current document contains potential issues that Donna could help with.
And don’t worry; Donna won’t break your original document. After going through the issues with Donna and selecting how to resolve them, you simply save a new version of the Document.
New Types of Issues
We’re working on a wiki where you can find all the issues Donna looks for, and get more information about them. The list is too long to post in this article but I did want to highlight some of the new issues that Donna can identify. We’re gradually rolling out these new issue-types as we create more training data with our partners and improve the accuracy scores of our AI models.
Do references refer to the correct clause?
Even though all references might point to an existing clause and correctly use Word’s cross-referencing feature this doesn’t prevent all mistakes. Sometimes information is moved to another clause, leaving references to the original clause “correct” but pointing to the wrong location.
Donna analyses the legal content so she understands that if you write “The term Data Processor is defined in clause 3 of this contract” that there should be a definition of Data Processor in clause 3.
Are there overlapping definitions?
One of our clients found that they had both defined Costs and Fees to mean almost exactly the same thing. Even though these terms were used correctly throughout the document they made it unclear to the drafter if certain payment schedules applied to both or only one specific term.
After Donna made them aware of this issue, they combined the terms. And to avoid confusion they simple specified more clearly the circumstances in which specific payment schedules were appropriate.
Are enumerations clearly marked as conjunctive or disjunctive?
Consider the following section. “Party A shall pay the Party B money if (a) the work is completed, (b) it is last day of the month, (c ) the total amount owed is more than €1000.”
It is now unclear if Party A must pay if clauses (a), (b) AND (c ) all are true or if any of (a), (b) OR (c ) is true. This mistake often happens as statements are added or removed from the sub-clauses, thereby also removing the accompanying and/or.
Versions & Automatic Updates
We now clearly show the version number of the app you have installed. This will help us in the future to diagnose problems and make sure that if we ever need to do a security patch we can clearly communicate which version you should have installed.
We also made it easier to check for updates yourself, so you don’t have to keep downloading the app from the website. And Donna will also automatically look for updates and install them in the background.
AI-model updates were already automatic (and not reflected in the version number) since they happen continuously as you use the app.
Improved UX for Speed!
We’ve done away with a lot of the clutter of the app, so there’s only one way to; navigate the issues, select how to resolve them and finally save a new version of the document.
And we added in a lot of intuitive UX-tweaks that will “invisible” to most users but tremendously speeds up how quickly you can navigate and resolve the issues. Even if your counter-party sends a really crappy document (because they always do!) using Donna it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to find and fix all the issues.
And we have quite a few more of these features on the roadmap.
