When The AES Corporation first started working with LawVu Draft (via ClauseBase, which was acquired by LawVu in 2025), the objective was to empower the business by efficiently delivering standardized clauses and templates.
Managing a global Fortune 500 legal department meant overseeing massive contract output and, in turn, a high volume of templates. The team faced classic bottlenecks in this area that impacted efficiency, risk, and service delivery.
- Deploying templates: Templates were available in Microsoft Word and flexibility was included with the help of comments, placeholders, highlights, etc. This often made using the material inefficient or unclear for the business user.
- Managing templates: Maintaining consistency between different templates was a challenge as they weren’t managed centrally. For example, if a standard arbitration clause required a legal update, the change had to be manually replicated across over 100 distinct documents.
Thanks to LawVu Draft, AES moved away from static, fragmented files toward a modular and centralized architecture that made it much easier for the business to draft documents by simply filling out a list of questions.
“The manual upkeep of dozens of different versions of the same clause was a risk we couldn’t ignore. The easy solution would be to leverage standard industry software like Microsoft SharePoint, but this was far too limited for what we needed. We chose ClauseBuddy (now LawVu Draft) because we needed a single source of truth – a system where a master change to one clause would automatically ripple through every document in our library, ensuring we are never drafting against outdated standards.”Raquel Rodriguez, Associate General Counsel – AES
Introducing AI into the drafting and reviewing process
As the legal AI revolution began to take shape, LawVu Draft (previously called “ClauseBuddy” as part of the ClauseBase suite of tools) was one of the first tools to embed AI, providing a general drafting, redlining, and reviewing assistant that lives directly inside Microsoft Word. This meant legal teams could scale without adding headcount or sacrificing quality by coupling their own expertise – playbooks, preferred clauses, precedent contracts, and shared legal knowledge – with AI-powered tools for proofreading, redlining, comparison, and consistency checks.
Like many companies, AES immediately set to work exploring the benefits of the technology, but it did have to overcome internal resistance.
“As our responsibility grew to include pushing AI adoption across the legal team, LawVu Draft was the first and easiest way for us to provide a tool the Legal team could actually use safely. Because we already had it in our tech stack, the friction was gone; it became our essential bridge to AI-powered drafting and reviewing before anything else was even on the table.”Raquel Rodriguez, Associate General Counsel – AES
The focus rapidly evolved from template management and deployment to utilizing LawVu Draft as a comprehensive AI assistant, allowing lawyers to draft clauses and review complex contracts within a secure environment. Once this transition was complete, the legal team shifted from being template users to AI power users, with LawVu Draft serving as one of the tools that enabled both free drafting and sophisticated third-party contract redlining.
Realizing global value
The value experienced by the AES legal team from adopting AI tools like LawVu Draft is best reflected in their adoption metrics: “Use of AI skyrocketed in 2024 from 30% to 80% and LawVu Draft played a big part in that success.”
A primary driver of this success was LawVu Draft’s native multilingual support; with half of the global team being Spanish-speaking, having this capability available from day one was a critical prerequisite. Furthermore, the legal team found the AI drafting features to be a “wonderful” addition to their daily operations, providing the flexibility to generate everything from basic clauses to complex redlines while keeping the styling of the document in pristine shape.
“We now have a shared brain of legal drafting knowledge along with a range of other tools to help our lawyers draft better and faster.”Raquel Rodriguez, Associate General Counsel – AES