OGL-56 Counsel

Draft first-pass documents from your own precedents

Give OGL-56 your firm's precedent or house style and a short instruction, and it produces a working first draft — engagement letters, NDAs, supply and services terms, settlement agreements, licence terms, policies. You keep the drafting standard; the engine removes the blank page.

Review an inbound contract clause by clause

Supply a counterparty draft and ask for a clause-by-clause read: what each provision does, where it departs from your usual position, which obligations sit with your client, and which points you may want to negotiate. What comes back is a working note for a fee earner — it is not advice, and it stands for nothing until a qualified person has read the document and reached their own conclusions.

Compare versions and explain what changed

Put two drafts side by side and ask what moved between them. OGL-56 sets out the substantive differences in plain terms — not only the words that changed but what the change does to risk, liability, term and termination — so a partner can see what is at stake before approving or pushing back.

Turn long documents into a usable summary

Condense bundles, reports, correspondence chains, board papers or lengthy agreements into a structured summary with the key dates, obligations, amounts and open questions pulled out. Useful for handover notes, matter opening and bringing a supervising solicitor into a file.

Draft correspondence and client-facing explanations

Produce client care letters, matter updates, chasers, instruction requests to counsel or experts, and plain-English explanations of what a clause or a process means. You set the register — formal, neutral or accessible — and where a passage does not sit right, you mark it and ask for that part to be redrafted.

Build and populate checklists for a matter type

Ask for a due diligence request list, a completion checklist, an onboarding checklist or an issues list for a particular kind of transaction, then have the engine populate it against the documents you supply and mark what is missing or unanswered.

Extract structured data from unstructured documents

Pull parties, commencement and expiry dates, notice periods, renewal mechanics, payment terms, caps and governing law out of the agreements you supply into a consistent table, so a review starts from data rather than from reading. Check the extracted entries against the source before working from them.

Interrogate a document with follow-up questions

Work conversationally over the same document — ask what the exit route is, whether there is an assignment restriction, what happens on insolvency — and keep drilling. Where an answer matters, put the underlying wording back in front of the question and read the reply against the clause itself.

Write the documents an SME actually needs

Employee handbooks, contractor terms, supplier onboarding packs, quotations and statements of work, internal policies. The engine drafts in your voice and to your structure, and the draft goes to a qualified person for review before it is issued or relied on.

Prepare for a conversation with your solicitor

For a business without in-house legal support, OGL-56 can set out an inbound agreement in plain English — how it is structured, what terms it contains, and questions you may want to raise. That list is a starting point, not a boundary: it does not mark out which parts of an agreement need advice and which do not, and it is no substitute for having a solicitor read the document before you sign.

Draft routine business correspondence

Proposals, tender responses, credit control letters, complaint responses, supplier disputes and internal briefings. You edit and approve rather than compose from scratch, and you can hold one house style across the whole set.

Prepare for meetings and decisions

Feed in the papers and ask for an agenda, a briefing note, a list of decisions required, and the questions nobody has answered yet. Good for board packs, client pitches and supplier reviews.

Turn scattered notes into a structured draft

Bullet points, email threads and meeting scribbles go in; a structured document comes out — a file note, a scope of work, a process description or an internal procedure.

Translate between technical and commercial language

Rewrite a legal or technical document for a commercial audience, or tighten a loose commercial description into language precise enough to sit in a contract schedule.

Standardise how your team writes

Set house style and standard wording once, and use OGL-56 to bring drafts from different people into a consistent format, heading structure and tone, then check the result before it goes out.

Draft and refine internal process documentation

Onboarding guides, matter workflows, escalation procedures and training material — drafted from how the work is actually done, kept current, and rewritten as the process changes.

A two-partner firm receives a long supply agreement from a corporate counterparty on a Friday afternoon and needs a position by Monday.

OGL-56 produces a clause-by-clause review note, marks the provisions that depart from the firm's usual position, drafts alternative wording for the clauses the partner singles out, and writes a short client-facing summary. The partner reads the agreement itself, corrects the note and takes responsibility for what goes to the client.

An SME is taking on its first fifteen employees and has no written HR documentation.

Working from the owner's description of how the business runs, OGL-56 drafts a handbook, contract templates and core policies to a single house style, together with a note of the assumptions it has drafted on and the points it could not resolve. The owner takes the drafts and that note to a solicitor, who decides what needs changing, what needs advice and what is missing.

A chambers clerk needs to bring counsel up to speed on a document-heavy matter.

From the papers supplied to it, OGL-56 produces a chronology, an issues list, a table of the key correspondence and a list of gaps and unanswered questions. Counsel reads that first and goes to the underlying documents knowing where to look, with the summary treated as a navigation aid and never as a substitute for reading the papers.

Best for

• Everyday drafting and review that makes up the bulk of a caseload or a business week
• Teams that would rather work in one place for general drafting, review and summarising
• Turning long documents into summaries, chronologies, checklists and structured data
• Producing first drafts in your own house style from your own precedents
• Businesses without in-house legal support who want to arrive prepared before they take advice

Not the tool for

• Legal advice of any kind — output is a draft for a qualified person to review, amend and take responsibility for
• Deciding whether you are compliant with any legal or regulatory obligation, or which parts of a document need a solicitor's input
• Anything you intend to file, serve or sign without a qualified person reading it in full
• Confirming the current state of the law on a point — verify against primary sources before relying on it