NetDocuments’ AI-Driven PatternBuilder MAX Is Now Generally Available; Comes with Nine Apps for Common Legal Use Cases

In July, NetDocuments announced the limited launch of PatternBuilder MAX, a generative AI-driven version of its PatternBuilder document assembly product that it said would enable firms to create custom generative AI automations tailored to the needs of their specific practice areas. At the time, I wrote about how one immigration lawyer had used it to dramatically shortcut the time-consuming process of drafting O-1 visa petitions.

NetDocuments said then that it was the first of a planned series of workflow-enhancement products — or “skills” — it would release, all under the moniker ndMAX and all built on the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.

Today, at its Inspire user conference in San Antonio, the company said that PatternBuilder MAX is now generally available, and comes with nine “out-of-the-box” apps that incorporate generative AI to address common legal use cases.

These pre-built PatternBuilder MAX apps – which NetDocuments calls Studio Apps – were designed based on insights and AI use cases from hundreds of customers, NetDocuments says. They can be used “as is” or modified based on a firm’s needs.

The nine apps released today are:

• Summarize: Generates a summary of a document in NetDocuments. Users can generate a general summary or apply a summary template for specialized use cases, such as depositions or loan agreements.
• Drafting: Automatically drafts a new document, allowing users to select a prior precedent document as an example or draft a document from scratch based on custom instructions. Use cases can include analyzing a patent application rejection letter and writing an appeal, taking a fact sheet and drafting a new lease, or creating a rejection in response to a demand letter.
• Extract: Automatically extracts one or more entities from the selected document, and resulting data can then be saved to a database, written into a document, or both. This app is ideal for identifying and storing contract data, NetDocuments says.
• Contract Playbook: Instantly analyze an agreement based on the selected contract playbook, including organization-specific contract playbooks that analyze any type of desired agreement.
• Timeline: Generates a timeline of events based on the selected text.
• Translate: Automatically translates text from one language into another, supporting over a dozen languages.
• Compare: Compares two documents based on criteria provided by the user.
• Continue Draft: Drafts the next section of a document based on prior content in the document. Optionally, users can include prior precedents to enhance the quality of the draft.
• Query Document: Ask one or more questions of a document stored in NetDocuments, ensuring quick answers even when buried in lengthy, complex documents.

“In talking with customers, we started to see very common themes around the use cases they wanted apps built for,” stated Dan Hauck, chief product officer. “Our Studio Apps not only address these common use cases but empower our customers to get started quickly with generative AI. We’ll continue to build more Studio Apps and make them available to our customers.”