ClauseBase was founded in 2016 by Maarten Truyens, who had more than 10 years of experience as an information technology lawyer, both in an international law firm and as inhouse legal counsel in the financial sector. Maarten was joined by Senne Mennes and Robbert Jacobs — both also working as lawyers in international law firms. All three share the same passion for transforming the legal drafting & negotiation process.
ClauseBase's initial product was Clause9, which revolutionised the drafting of sophisticated legal documents by taking a unique "clause-based" approach, with unparallelled power to support the complexity required by today's legal documents.
In 2022, ClauseBase chooses to delight its customers even further by launching ClauseBuddy as the next step in legal drafting. Through its integration in Microsoft Word, rich toolset of easy-to-use tools and smart use of AI, ClauseBuddy enables legal professionals of all kind to draft better and faster.
Over the years, ClauseBase has consistently grown its customer base of law firms and inhouse legal teams (both in the private and governmental sector) across the globe.
Learn why and how the ClauseBase platform is different from competing products.
Legal drafting is hard. It consists of many different aspects, within very different contexts. You therefore need different tools that are suitable for the task at hand.
Competing legal drafting products focus on a single drafting tool — e.g. data-driven form filling, or AI-suported writing, or extracting clauses from old files, or creating templates within MS Word. And they all make strong claims why their own single paradigm is all you really need.
ClauseBase is the only platform on the market that offers a suite of tools — with different levels of power (easy to advanced), different paradigms (clause-based, template-based, AI-based, search-focused, ...), different operational modes (human-curated and automatic), different software environments (MS Word, Outlook, desktop browsers, mobile phones and server-to-server).
Most document automation tools start as drafting software, but quickly expand into neighbouring contract management areas such as archiving and analysis.
Why? Because developing a good document drafting engine is actually very hard once you move beyond the basics.
We have been researching and developing document drafting since 2011, exclusively focusing on document drafting, to make sure all the hard parts, subtleties and idiosyncrasies of contract drafting are covered. In multiple languages and for different legal styles.
That’s why we can proudly state that we are the most powerful solution on the market. Take a look for yourself over at our features list of Clause9.
The ClauseBase platform was 100% designed and developed by former lawyers, who together have 20+ years of practical contract drafting experience. We are driven by our need to create a tool that we would have liked to use ourselves.
Conversely, many legaltech products were created by a combination of legal outsiders (developers, marketeers, economists, contract managers, venture capitalists, ...), with varying degrees of input from lawyers. Even if the product vision was envisaged by a lawyer, that lawyer will seldom play a steering role in the development.
ClauseBase is passionately developed in Belgium, a small country at the heart of Europe, where lawyers have to juggle with three (and sometimes four) languages on a daily basis.
Multi-lingual support is therefore deeply embedded into the product, and not bolted-on.
ClauseBase was built by two former data protection experts. Data protection is not an afterthought, but deeply ingrained in the product.
As a testimony to our compliance, we publish a separate compliance-focused website.
