Definely Cascade is a Gen AI tool for identifying the knock-on effects of changes made within a contract.
Contracts are complex documents, full of nested definitions, cross-references and dependencies, and a single change to one clause can unintentionally affect multiple areas across the agreement. Cascade gives you peace of mind by surfacing the first, second and third order consequences of every change.
What Cascade can extract
Cascade is currently able to extract the redlines produced by:
Word's built-in Compare functionality, or
Track Changes
This means Cascade can pick up the edits introduced during different drafting iterations as well as changes made by the counterparty, whichever way the redlines have been captured.
Starting your review
To run Cascade on your document:
Open the document in Microsoft Word.
Open the Definely panel and select the Cascade tab.
Click Get Started.
Cascade will analyse the document and produce a list of every change that has been made.
Reviewing the list of changes
Once Cascade has finished extracting changes, you'll see them organised by:
Definition level: changes made to defined terms, and
Clause level: changes made to clauses within the body of the document.
You can click through each change in the list to jump straight to it in the document and review it in context.
Searching for a specific change
If you're working with a long document that has a lot of edits, use the Search bar at the top of the Cascade panel to narrow the list. Start typing the term, clause number or wording you're looking for, and Cascade will filter the results to surface only the matching changes.
This is useful when you know you want to focus on a particular concept, for example, every change related to "Indemnity", and don't want to scroll through every other edit to find it.
What's next
In the next article, we'll show you how to use Cascade to Run an analysis to identify the knock-on effects of each change, including the second and third order consequences that can be easy to miss on a manual review.