First Look: jEugene Compass

jEugene Compass calls itself “quality assurance for law firms.” It uses machine learning to simplify document drafting, review, and proofreading. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence, and jEugene gets smarter the more data it absorbs.

Features

jEugene has a free plan limited to 8 documents/month, so it is easy to create an account and get started with uploading your documents. It’s a dead simple interface—all you need to do is drag and drop a Word document or a PDF and tell it to get started.

At first glance, the product appears to be a simple proofreader—albeit one focused primarily on contracts and other similar definition-heavy documents. And if you use jEugene on rare occasions to read through one document, that’s kind of what it is. But it doesn’t look for typos. It is designed to catch undefined terms and inconsistent references, like accidentally referring to a party as “XYZ Company” in one place and “XYZ Co.” in another.

The real power of jEugene comes into play when you practice in an area where you routinely get buried in a lot of documents that are technical, repetitive, cross-reference each other, or have language that needs to be changed wholesale when a law changes. jEugene allows you to set a single definitions file and cross-check all your documents against that file. You can also set up “alert rules” that are particular to your firm and apply to all documents. You can tell it once that a client moved, and it will catch it whenever you accidentally use the old address in a document. It figures out broken cross-references, like when you keep referring to “Section 11.4(g)” but that disappeared seven drafts ago. Give it a list of known phrases so that it doesn’t keep flagging something you don’t need flagged. You can “train” jEugene by uploading existing documents so that it learns more about your drafting conventions.

Because the program is underpinned by machine learning technology, the more materials you give it, the better it gets at anticipating your needs and catching your errors.

Security

jEugene can be accessed via the web or installed on premises. The latter is probably only a good fit only for mid-size to large firms that have an IT department and dedicated servers on site. Files on jEugene’s servers are encrypted with bank-grade (256-bit) encryption, which is typical for legal software. Uploading and downloading your documents occurs over secure SSL channels. Your processed documents are deleted after you download them, but some data does remain if you have set up things like rules and known phrases. Those are encrypted and then saved. Full documents that you have uploaded to help train jEugene are converted to a machine-readable language and encrypted so it is no longer possible for a human to read those documents.

Pricing

jEugene has a free solo plan and will process up to eight documents per month for free. That includes web access only. For enterprise solutions and high-volume users, the pricing is customized, and you can set it up to run on your on-premises server if you don’t want to have your documents being processed in the cloud.

Final Thoughts

jEugene would be useful for any transactional practitioner in a document-heavy field. If you are spending a lot of time checking and rechecking drafts and making sure names aren’t misspelled and worrying that a 75-page commercial lease has internal references that no longer point to anything, it will save you time and money. It isn’t currently geared towards people who are writing briefs, and that’s just fine—there are other tools to help you improve your writing in that arena. But if you need to fight your way through a dense thicket of contract-style documents regularly, jEugene is worth checking out.

First Look: jEugene Compass was originally published on Lawyerist.com.