Welcome to the third Month in Review — given this is now the second of a total 3 articles that cover more than one month, "Months in Review" might be a more appropriate title. That's on me...
In the last edition we introduced Playbooks and a batch of improvements to how Counsel references your organisation's knowledge. This time, the big theme is simpler: removing the work before the work starts.
During a contract review, a lot of what contributes to the work legal teams carry isn't the review itself — everything that happens before it contributes too. Business users trying to answer intake questions that require finding specific terms buried deep in a 100-page contract — terms they may not have the legal expertise to interpret. Lawyers receiving submissions with missing or incorrect key facts, then re-reading the contract themselves to verify what should already have been captured. Or business users bypassing intake altogether and going straight to legal, because the form felt too hard.
Most of what shipped in April and May attacks that gap — and the reason it matters is that better inputs lead to better outcomes downstream.
Here are the highlights!
Approve & eSign Autofill with Plexus AI
In the March edition I flagged that we were working on streamlining the document intake experience. That's now live and we are seeing and hearing good things from our customers!
When you upload a contract into Approve & eSign, Plexus AI reads the document and pre-fills your intake form — party names, dates, contract values, jurisdictions — pulled straight from the source document.
Critically, this includes your organisation's custom questions — the specific fields your legal team has configured for your intake process. These are often the hardest questions for a business user to answer correctly, because they reflect your organisation's specific requirements, not generic contract metadata.
No more flicking between a 100-page contract and the intake form trying to find an answer you're not sure how to interpret!
Pro tip: Autofill uses the hint text you've configured against each intake field to guide its interpretation. The better your hints describe what you're looking for, the better the AI answers will be. If you haven't revisited your hint text recently, it's worth a pass now that AI is reading them.
The problem this solves has two sides:
Business users were spending time manually answering questions they weren't always confident about, sometimes interpreting legal language they didn't have the expertise to understand.
Legal teams then received submissions with missing or incorrect key facts, and ended up re-reading the contract themselves to verify what should already have been captured. Structured intake was defeating its own purpose.
Autofill changes that. AI-suggested answers are clearly marked so you can review them before submitting. Where the contract doesn't contain the answer, the field stays blank. Fields show a shimmer animation while AI is working, so you know what's still being processed and what's ready to review - most importantly the AI prefilling your answers is non-blocking and not destructive, meaning you can start filling the form out manually anyway without fear of losing anything.
Our data shows that our average time to pre-fill the form is around the 7.5 seconds.
Matters: private comments for your legal team
When lawyers discuss a matter internally — risk assessments, strategy, sensitive context — that conversation shouldn't be visible to the business user who raised the request. Until now, all comments on a matter were visible to everyone with access to that matter.
Now, members of your Legal Team can leave private comments that are only visible to other Legal Team members.
Private comments don't trigger notifications to business users, and the comment toggle remembers your last choice — so if you tend to comment privately, it stays there.
This is one of those changes that sounds straightforward but changes how legal teams actually use the platform. Internal discussions stay internal, but remain attached to the matter — so your audit trail stays complete. External communication stays clean. No need for workarounds like slack or emails just to have private legal conversations!
Clearer admin visibility
A few changes this period that make it easier for administrators to see what's happening in their environment.
Professional user licensing is now visible. Account admins see a licence column and "Pro" chip on the User list, making it easy to identify who has Professional user access at a glance. Pro pills also appear throughout the product next to features that are gated behind a Professional licence — so it's clearer what's available to whom.
Playbooks can be enabled or disabled. Administrators can now toggle Playbooks on and off for their organisation, which is useful during creation and testing. You can build and refine a Playbook with it disabled, then switch it on when it's ready to apply across all Counsel interactions.
Activity feeds now capture more detail. Key fact names now appear on create, update, and delete entries for Documents. The Matters activity feed now logs new matters created via Request Legal Support, including the name, creator, and timestamp. Small changes, but they close gaps in your audit trail.
Autofill in the wild
One of the things I like about this period is that you can see the Autofill feature getting shaped by real usage in the weeks after launch. We shipped the headline, then refined it through a series of fast follow-ups based on what we were seeing.
Refinements that came directly from customer feedback and what our team observed in early usage. If you're using Autofill and notice something that could be better, let us know — this is exactly the kind of input that shapes what we ship next.
What's next
The Autofill release delivered on the intake streamlining we flagged in March.
Next up: Automatic Contract Redlining.
Today, Contract Review flags what needs attention — missing clauses, risky terms, deviations from your precedent, or even just the basics like bad grammar and formatting. Redlining takes the next step: proposing the fix, inline, based on your organisation's position. Think of it as Plexus drafting the markup your lawyer would have made, ready for review rather than starting from scratch. We're close on this one (literally any day now), and we're excited about what it means for how legal teams handle volume.
More soon.
If you have feedback on any of these changes, or something you'd love to see next, reach out to your Customer Success Manager or drop us a note at [email protected].
— Cadell Falconer, Head of Product