Draft 3.9: hover any sentence, see the precedent

Draft 3.9 is available to all tenants from today. The release has one feature and a number of consequences. The feature is sentence-level provenance: hover any sentence in a draft and see where it came from.

Summary

• Every sentence in a new draft carries a source: a precedent clause from the firm’s matter history via Recall, a playbook rule, an answer from the deal-point form, or “composed, no direct precedent”.
• The hover card in the Word add-in shows the source, the matter and date where applicable, and a link that opens the precedent in Recall’s trace view.
• Provenance survives editing. Rewrite part of a sentence and the card says so.
• A citation table can be exported as an appendix or a separate document.
• Translated deliveries under 3.8 cite the English source sentence and the translation-memory entry used.
• Hover cards require the Recall 2.7 index. Tenants still migrating will see partial citations until the re-index completes.

Why the sentence, not the clause

Draft has cited its sources at clause level since 3.4. A clause would be marked as drawn from, say, a 2024 share purchase agreement, and partners could check it there. That was useful and not quite honest, because a clause is rarely one thing. An indemnity clause in a typical first draft opens with language from one precedent, takes its carve-outs from another, and has a proviso the model composed because nothing in the firm’s history quite fitted.

Partners noticed. The question we heard most often was some version of “which bit of this is ours?” Clause-level citation could not answer it. 3.9 can.

The pipeline change behind this is a shift from compose-then-cite to retrieve-then-compose. Draft now assembles candidate sentences and fragments from Recall and the playbook first, each tagged with its origin, and composes around them. Composed material is tagged as composed. The tags travel with the text through the rest of the pipeline, including voice modelling and multilingual delivery.

How provenance survives editing

Each sentence carries a provenance token through the Word editor. Light edits keep the token and the card reads “from [source], edited”. If a user rewrites more than roughly 40% of a sentence’s tokens, the card changes to “composed by [user] from [source]”. A sentence replaced entirely becomes “composed by [user]”. New sentences typed by the user are tagged as theirs from the start.

Nothing here is a judgement about quality. It is a record of who wrote what, which is what a partner reviewing a junior’s draft wants to know, and what a firm wants to be able to show later.

Precedent links respect ethical walls. A user who is not cleared for a matter sees “precedent withheld (wall)” instead of the matter name. The sentence remains in the draft; the firm’s walls were already applied when Recall retrieved it, so the user is seeing language they are allowed to use from a source they are not allowed to open.

What to watch for

• Drafts produced before 3.9 have clause-level citations only. There is no retroactive sentence-level provenance; the information was not recorded.
• “Composed, no direct precedent” is not a warning. In a typical first draft 15 to 25% of sentences fall in this category, mostly transitions, recitals and provisos. If the share is much higher, the deal-point form or the precedent pool is probably thin for that document type.
• The citation table can be long. A forty-page SPA produces several hundred rows. Most firms export it once at signature for the file rather than carrying it through negotiation.
• Hover cards add a small delay on first open of a long document while provenance loads. Subsequent opens are cached locally.

Known limitations

• Up to three sources are shown per sentence. A sentence stitched from more than three is shown with its three strongest sources and a count.
• Provenance in tables and schedules is recorded at row level, not cell level. Pricing schedules and milestone tables will show one source per row.
• The 40% edit threshold is a heuristic. A short sentence with two words changed may flip to “composed by user” when a human would call it an edit.
• Translated deliveries cite the English source. They do not yet cite precedent in the target language, even where the firm’s history holds one.

The practical effect is that a draft now shows its working at the level a reader actually reads. Whether the working is good is still the partner’s call.