ZAO-10 Starter

First drafts of routine correspondence

Produce an opening draft of client care letters, chasers, updates to the other side and internal file correspondence from your instructions and your own house wording. The fee earner edits and approves before anything is sent.

Plain-English clause explanations

Paste a clause from a contract you hold and ask for a plain-English restatement of the wording, together with the dates, notice periods and obligations it picks out. Read the restatement against the clause itself before using it to explain an obligation to a lay client or a business stakeholder.

Attendance and file notes from rough notes

Turn shorthand notes taken during a call or meeting into a structured attendance note with headings, decisions taken and follow-up points, ready for the fee earner to check against their own recollection and put on file.

Chronologies and document indexes

Build a dated chronology or an index from material you supply, so the sequence of events and the documents referred to are laid out in one place for review against the underlying papers.

Enquiry triage into a structured summary

Convert a free-text client enquiry into a structured summary — parties, dates, what the client says happened, what they are asking for — plus the questions it identifies as still outstanding, so the fee earner has a starting point to work from when they open the file.

Version comparison of wording you hold

Set two versions of the same clause or document side by side and get the differences described in prose, so a reviewer has a starting list of the differences to check against both versions.

Populating your own precedents

Take an engagement letter, NDA or standard form from your own precedent bank and fill it against the matter details you provide, leaving the drafting decisions and the final wording with the supervising lawyer.

Internal knowledge write-ups

Draft internal how-to notes, matter-opening checklists and process guidance for the team from the way your firm actually works, in England & Wales terminology, for a supervisor to approve before it is circulated.

Customer and supplier correspondence

Draft the day-to-day emails a business owner never gets round to — payment chasers, service updates, complaint acknowledgements, supplier queries — in a house tone you specify.

Policies and procedures from your house rules

Turn the way you already do things into a written policy or procedure document with proper headings and numbering, so there is a draft to check, approve and then issue to staff, and something to revisit each year. Anything with legal effect — disciplinary, grievance, data protection, health and safety — should be checked by a qualified person before it is issued.

Meetings into actions

Convert meeting notes into a decisions-and-actions list with owners and dates, so the outcome of a meeting is captured rather than remembered.

Proposals and quotes

Draft a proposal or scope of work from the details of the job, including assumptions, exclusions and what happens next, ready for you to price and check.

Recruitment paperwork

Draft job adverts, role descriptions and interview question sets from a short brief about the role, for review before publication.

Website and marketing copy drafts

Produce first-pass copy for service pages, listings and customer-facing FAQs from your own descriptions of what you sell, which you then edit to your own claims and evidence.

Tidying and standardising text

Reformat inconsistent lists, headings, reference numbers and address blocks into one house format so records and mailings read the same way throughout.

Customer-facing explanations

Rewrite technical, internal or contractual language into something a customer can follow, working from the wording of the document, for you to check the rewrite against the original before it goes out.

A paralegal has forty minutes of scribbled notes from a client call on a commercial lease dispute and needs an attendance note on the file before the fee earner reviews it tomorrow.

ZAO-10 restructures the notes into a dated attendance note — who attended, what the client instructed, the dates and documents referred to, and the points left open — and the paralegal asks it to mark anything it cannot resolve from the notes rather than complete it. The paralegal reads the note against their own recollection and the original notes, corrects it and files it; the fee earner reviews the note as the record.

An SME owner has been sent a supplier's standard terms and wants to prepare before sending them to their solicitor.

ZAO-10 produces a plain-English restatement of the clauses and pulls out the dates, notice periods and charges it finds, for checking against the document, together with a list of questions to put to the solicitor. It does not tell the owner whether to sign and it is not a substitute for reading the terms or for advice on them — the point is that they arrive at the advice conversation with questions prepared rather than reading the document cold, and it is the solicitor's advice they act on.

A small firm is rolling out a new matter-opening process and needs the internal guidance written up for six staff.

From a short description of how the firm wants matters opened, ZAO-10 drafts a numbered procedure with a checklist and a one-page summary for the wall. The practice manager edits it to match the firm's actual systems and supervision arrangements, and the supervising lawyer approves it, before it is issued to staff.

Best for

• Trying the platform on real work before committing to a paid tier
• Routine, well-defined drafting where the format matters more than the judgement
• Paralegals, trainees and support staff producing first drafts for fee-earner review
• SMEs with no in-house writer who still need paperwork that reads properly
• Getting past the blank page when the shape of the document is already known

Not the tool for

• Anything going out — to a client, a counterparty, the court, or to your own staff as firm policy — without a qualified person reading and approving it first
• Deciding the legal position — it drafts and summarises, you and your supervising lawyer decide
• Treating output as advice, as a compliance sign-off, or as a substitute for instructing a solicitor
• Sustained departmental volume — the free allowance is sized for trial and occasional use, not for running a whole caseload