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.

No more macros, or shortcuts to remember, now you can cross-reference the Donna way. In our latest update, Donna's cross-references overview just got a lot more powerful. Why? Because now Donna can help you with drafting as well by taking care of those cumbersome MS Word workflows. 

Now you can use Donna to...insert new cross-references and update existing ones. 👇

It's pretty simple. To add new references, type in the search bar to find the relevant text or paragraph number, select the style of references you'd like to use and press insert.

To update existing references there are two options. You can use Donna's quick fix option and select 'Fix All' 👇 or you can manually update just as below 👇. 

There's a few more features building on this foundation coming soon, so stay tuned!

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.

Inspired by these "festive" times upon us Donna can now check that important dates don't happen to fall on a banking or national holiday.

And Donna does it in a smart way too 🧠 First she looks at which countries and regions are relevant to the contract. She then loads the calendars for those regions. This way she can even notify you of more obscure holidays.

This feature should help those of you who frequently write agreements with international parties. 

You can view these holidays by hovering the golden star in the Dates overview.

Or you can also find a suggestion when going through the Clarity category.

For those of you who sort your definitions in alphabetical order, we've got something cool for you. Donna can now find places where someone has placed a definition out of order!

Over the coming weeks we'll be making several improvements. Ensuring that Donna can also find smaller blocks of alphabetically sorted definitions than she currently can. We also hope to be able to point you exactly to where the definition should be moved, and we might even be able to make it a quick fix! 🤞

Now that Donna's brain has been upgraded we've finally been able to introduce a new category of issues that you have been asking for a long time. Donna will start ensuring the document is consistently formatted and phrased.

The first issue that we're introducing is Donna's ability to ensure that Definitions are consistently formatted. For instance if you like making your definitions bold (good on you!) Donna will now pick up on when someone else has come in and not played by your rules.

Based on a recent tweet by one of our favourite Legal Tech gurus we were made aware of the following problem:

And with such a clear cry for help, we had to do something. So we assembled an elite task-force and now half a day later...problem solved!

Donna can now find places where the Wingdings dot is used and will suggest a more colleague friendly alternative. Not only that, Donna can actually fix it for you with the click of a button!

Donna is still learning and so she might not pick up on all cases just yet, but we hope to polish those final details in the days to come. For now we think it's mission accomplished. 

Until the next bat-signal! 🦸‍♀️

You can now easily create an overview of all the references in a document. Even if they don't use cross-references (yet).

Using the preview snippets (remember, Alt + click) allows you to quickly check if references are referring to the right paragraph. And naturally Donna will also show any suggestions of her own.

But the fun doesn't stop there. If you select a reference in a document Donna will (if available) also show a snippet of what the reference is referring to. This allows you to quickly check a reference while reading the text. Without the need to jump around in the document.

We've added the ability show and fix a suggestion right from an overview.

For example while going through your defined terms you can immediately fix an issue as you come across them. Without having to switch back and forth between the suggestions section and the defined term section. Neat!