It turns out that Donna and MS Word had different ideas about what paragraphs were reasonable to cross-reference in a document. This lead to that in certain conditions, especially when there were a lot of bullet points, Donna would fail to insert a cross-reference.

We have now worked around the issue. There are still some extremely rare corner-cases that are difficult to detect due to a limit in MS Word's code. But we've allowed Donna to guess in a way that seems reasonable in most contracts.

In practice, this means that Donna is able to help you insert cross-references with ease in your day-to-day drafting.

Note: The fix is available from version 0.0.43. If you haven't received the update yet you can try and restart Donna by right-clicking on the tray-icon, selecting Restart, and keeping Donna closed for a few minutes. The update will load automatically and Donna will restart when ready. You can also download the latest version from your dashboard (https://my.donna.legal).

One of Donna's handy definition suggestions was to look for terms lacking a definition in a contract. One way Donna did this was to consider the capitalization of a word. So if somewhere in the text suddenly you see a word like Potato, without a matching definition; that would be a good candidate.

However, this would lead to some quite philosophical conundrums. For example in the sentence "except for an act of God, you shall...". In that case "God" fit Donna's description of a term and there was indeed no definition of God in the document. So Donna would suggest "the term 'God' is not defined".

I think we can all agree that although 'technically' correct, these are not the kind of hard decisions you want to be facing while drafting a contract. So we expanded Donna's grasp for commonly understood items such as Countries, Deities, and Currencies to name a few.

This should hopefully help you stay focused on drafting instead of having to ponder our existence in the universe.

We found that in upgrading Donna's AI models we had left some "old ways of thinking" in the system. This could lead to Donna getting contradicting opinions about what was and wasn't a date. This meant that sometimes dates would suddenly seem to appear or disappear when updating the document.

We've now resolved the issue. The coming weeks we expect to be deprecating the final parts of the old system which would fully eliminate the possibility of this bug occurring again. But until then, if you run into any funny business...let us know and we'll be able to fix it quickly.

Tracking your changes in Word is a smart practice, and you probably use them all the time. Donna used to be overly sensitive when it came to your track changes and would get confused by what was added to the document and what had been deleted. Which would cause Donna's highlights to show up in the wrong place. Utterly confusing!

We have made some drastic changes in how we interpret Word documents which means now Donna better understands how to look at a document that contains tracked changes.

Making highlights a lot more precise! 

If you were invited by a colleague or admin to give Donna a try. You might have seen a blank screen after installing Donna. Oops. This is because Donna used to block access to the app for those who weren't administrators within an organisation's account. This is now fixed.

A bit of background for if you're interested 👇

We're paranoid about security at Donna. That's why we setup our systems so that if we forget to specifically give permission to see a field of data the default is to deny any form of access.

One such field was the subscription status of your organisation, which by default is only accessible to administrators of that organisation. But by accident were asking for this data as well in the app without having extended access for this field to non administrative users. This meant the app was not able to properly authenticate and the erros coming from that caused the blank screen.