London – Thomson Reuters is forging closer links between its market-leading know-how solution, Practical Law, and its innovative document automation software, Contract Express, to help lawyers draft contracts more easily and more effectively.

The closer integration will provide Contract Express customers with up to 300 pre-automated templates and standard clauses prepared and maintained by the editorial experts behind Practical Law. Contract Express users will be able to quickly create bespoke versions of the existing Practical Law templates for their own use and will be notified when the original templates and clauses are updated by the Practical Law editorial team. The closer integration will widen the appeal of Contract Express among law firms of all sizes.

In a further step, the company has replaced the ‘engine’ behind the Fast Draft tool within Practical Law with the technology from Contract Express. The move puts the innovative technology at the heart of the company’s drafting tools for lawyers and offers a more streamlined, user-friendly and faster drafting experience for its customers.

The developments come as Thomson Reuters releases the latest version of Contract Express (version 7.0) which introduces a host of new features including; Negotiator, Contacts, questionnaire drafting notes and – for users in the UK – Companies House and postcode ‘look-up’.

“It is little over a year since the acquisition of Contract Express by Thomson Reuters and I’m extremely pleased with the advances we’ve made in this timeframe,” said Lucinda Case, managing director of the UK&I Legal business of Thomson Reuters. “The closer integration of Contract Express with our existing solutions has always been an aim for Thomson Reuters and it’s a direction that is supported by many of our customers who want to work in new and more effective ways.”

“Today’s announcement is great news for customers of Contract Express and Practical Law. It has been a long held ambition of our development team to combine the document automation capabilities of Contract Express with the best legal content available. The steps we have taken today help us to realize this ambition and they will offer a more robust and user-friendly technology enabling lawyers to do more with their legal content,” said Andy Wishart, global head of Contract Express at Thomson Reuters.

About Contract Express 7.0:

Contract Express 7.0 also introduces a new Contacts feature, which allows users to share contact information between document templates via a centralised data store of contacts and entities. For any given contact or entity, users can discover which documents are using that data. When re-drafting a document in Contract Express, users are notified if the contacts and entities used in the questionnaire have been updated.

Questionnaire Drafting Notes allows template authors to create in-line guidance within the Contract Express Preview feature. This guidance helps drafters understand the importance of specific clauses.

The Companies House feature allows users in the UK to quickly find company details and contacts to use in their templates and keep those up-to-date. The Postcode look-up feature will enable users to search for UK postcodes inside the Contract Express questionnaire.

“I’m excited about the Negotiator feature we’ve introduced in Contract Express 7.0. It’s a Microsoft Word add-in that enables lawyers to manage red line edits and merge these multiple edits into one document. This was previously a pain point for many of our customers,” added Wishart.

Contract Express, with its patented technology, offers law firms and lawyers an easy-to-deploy, simple-to-scale and intuitive solution, allowing them to quickly embrace modern digital document drafting. It enables lawyers to automate templates right inside Microsoft Word® and is akin to marking up a document with a red pen in a fraction of the time it would take in prior-generation solutions.

More than 100 of the world's leading law firms and corporations are already using Contract Express to drive document creation efficiency.

Thomson Reuters

Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of news and information for professional markets. Our customers rely on us to deliver the intelligence, technology and expertise they need to find trusted answers. The business has operated in more than 100 countries for more than 100 years. For more information, go to www.thomsonreuters.com.

CONTACT

Paul Sandell
Business Communications
Tel: +44 (0)207 542 8616
Email: paul.sandell@thomsonreuters.com