ACS-46 Drafting

First drafts from a short brief

Turn an instruction note and the papers you supply into a structured first draft — engagement letter, letter before action, side letter, internal memo — with headings, defined terms and schedules laid out for you to settle.

Clause drafting with alternatives

Ask for wording on a specific point, such as limitation of liability, termination or confidentiality, and get two or three drafting options taking different positions, so you can pick the one that fits the deal rather than rewriting a single version.

Adapting your own precedents

Paste a firm precedent and ask for it to be worked up for the matter in hand — parties, dates, defined terms and governing law — then read the result through, cross-references included, before you use it.

Issues lists on inbound contracts

Ask for a clause-by-clause issues list on an agreement sent to you, set against the positions you have described, with questions to put back to the other side. Use it as a starting point for your own review of the agreement, not as a substitute for reading it.

Plain-English notes for clients

Ask for a covering note that explains in ordinary language what a clause or a whole agreement does, to sit alongside the agreement for a lay client. Any change to the operative wording is yours to make and settle.

Matter correspondence

Draft the run of letters and emails a matter generates — acknowledgements, document requests, chasers, progress updates — in the tone and house style you set.

Attendance and file notes

Turn rough notes from a call or meeting into a structured attendance note setting out actions, dates and next steps, for you to check against your own record before it goes on the file.

Summaries and chronologies

Condense an agreement, a statement or a run of correspondence into a chronology or an issue summary you can work from, with the points you specify pulled out for checking against the source.

Policies and internal documents

Draft staff handbooks, expenses policies and IT or data-handling policies from your own requirements, in a structure you can circulate for comment.

Terms of business and customer wording

Produce working drafts of terms of business, service descriptions, and cancellation and refund wording, for a qualified person to review in full before you publish them.

Proposals and tender responses

Build responses from a question list and your own service descriptions, then check every claim in the draft against what your business can commit to before you submit it.

Commercial correspondence

Write supplier, customer and landlord letters — chasers, complaints, notices to quit or renew — from a short instruction and the facts you provide.

One document, several audiences

Take a single document and produce board, staff and customer versions, adjusting register and length for each audience, then compare the versions before they go out.

Meeting papers and minutes

Turn an agenda and rough notes into board or management minutes, an action log and the follow-up emails that go with them.

HR documents

Draft role descriptions, offer letters, probation and appraisal letters from your own headings and terms, for sign-off by whoever owns the process.

Standardising a set of documents

Ask for a group of documents to be redrafted to one house style, tone and set of defined terms, then read them side by side and settle the differences.

A commercial client sends over a supplier agreement and asks whether they can sign it.

You give ACS-46 the agreement together with your own red lines, and ask for a clause-by-clause issues list, suggested replacement wording for each point raised, and a short plain-English note for the client. The fee earner reads the agreement alongside the list — anything the list does not raise is still for the fee earner to catch — decides the position and signs off what goes back.

An SME owner is launching a new service line and needs terms of business to go with it.

The owner describes the service, how they charge, the cancellation arrangements and what they are not taking on. ACS-46 produces a structured draft with headings and definitions. The owner marks the points they want to raise, then sends the whole draft to their adviser, who reviews it and settles the final wording before anything is published.

A partner comes out of a client meeting with rough notes.

Paste the notes in and ask for an attendance note for the file, a client email confirming what was discussed, and a task list with dates against each item. The partner checks each one against the notes and their own record, corrects anything that is off, and approves before it leaves the office.

Best for

• Day-to-day drafting where you want a working first draft rather than a specialist deep dive
• Teams working from their own precedents, playbooks and house style
• Mixed workloads — legal drafting one hour, business documents the next
• Firms and chambers who want documents drafted to one set of house conventions
• SME teams with no in-house legal support who need a working draft to take to an adviser

Not the tool for

• Producing final, signature-ready documents — every draft needs review and sign-off by a qualified person before it is used or sent
• Legal advice on your particular circumstances, or any decision about whether you meet a legal or regulatory obligation
• Checking facts, figures, dates or references, or treating an issues list as a complete review — verify what the draft asserts against your own source documents and read the underlying document in full
• Work governed by a legal system outside England & Wales without a qualified check on local law and drafting conventions