Legal technology provider Draftable has announced the launch of Draftable Clean, a metadata cleaning solution developed in response to demand from law firm customers and prospects. This is Draftable’s first move outside of the document comparison space.
Draftable Legal was launched by Draftable in 2023 in response to demand from the legal market for more choice of document comparison solutions. Headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, it now has teams across the US, EMEA and APAC, with around 1,000 law firm customers globally. Speaking to Legal IT Insider, general manager Dr Caspar Roxburgh said that the most consistent request from its customers was for metadata cleaning to be available alongside Draftable Compare.
Inadvertent metadata disclosure is an ongoing, industry-wide risk. Sensitive information, such as comments, author details and revision history are regularly sent from a firm unintentionally, often at the moment a document is attached to an email and sent.
Roxburgh told us: “Draftable’s been in market with a legal comparison solution since 2023 and it’s had an incredible run with enormous uptake. People love it. But speaking to some law firms, they said, ‘We love what you’re doing with comparison, but for our firm to make a switch to Draftable for Compare we need metadata cleaning, because these are products that have historically been sold together. There’s a workflow connection between the two.
“Firms are working on documents and want to send them out. Clean is synced into your e-mail. It checks for sensitive data. It clears it out automatically.”
Last year Draftable launched Redline in Email for live redlining, plus the ability to create a Departures Table of clauses that have been amended. Roxburgh said that those changes came as a result of law firm request. Metadata cleaning “was the number one product that we were asked to build next.”
Metadata cleaning is already provided by numerous vendors and Roxburgh says: “I was really skeptical that this was actually the product we should build. I looked at the market and I thought ‘It’s a busy space. There are a lot of players.’” Vendors including Adobe, Litera and Novaplex have metadata cleaning capability but Roxburgh says: “Honestly, the signal from the market was overwhelming.”
Document comparison and metadata cleaning is an area that many assume will be impacted by the availability of generative AI tools but Roxburgh says: “You’re paying for a tool that is protecting you from a downside risk and you want to know that it’s always going to perform reliably.”
Draftable Clean is available now as a desktop application and Microsoft Outlook add-in for Windows, and integrates with iManage, NetDocuments and SharePoint. Alongside automatic metadata cleaning, users can reorder and rename attachments and generate formatted attachment lists in the email body, with notes and annotations.
Roxburgh told us: “If you’re a lawyer, like you don’t really want to know that your document’s being cleaned. You certainly don’t want your emails being interrupted and you can’t send them because there’s some piece of software that’s stopping you because of some policy. That’s a frustration. That’s a bad experience. So we designed it in a way to avoid disrupting the end user that also meets the need of the administrator.”
For more information, see Draftable’s new feature page HERE.
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