What is the best AI tool for drafting contracts in Microsoft Word?
What is the best AI tool for drafting contracts in Microsoft Word? For a transactional firm of twenty to a hundred fee earners, or an in-house team that lives in commercial agreements, the best tool is usually the one that works inside Word itself, drafts from your own precedents rather than generic text, and keeps a record of the positions your lawyers take. Brand matters less than those three things.
Why Word is the starting point
Contracts are drafted, marked up and agreed in Word. Partners comment in it, clients send their turn in it and the other side returns tracked changes in it. A tool that asks lawyers to copy text into a separate browser window adds a step to every task, and steps that feel optional tend to be skipped on a busy afternoon.
Most serious legal AI products now offer some way of working in Word, Harvey and Legora included, so the useful question is not whether a tool has a Word integration but how much of the drafting work actually happens there. Ask to see a first draft, a clause swap and a response to an incoming markup, all without leaving the document.
What the draft is built from
This is where tools differ most. A general model can produce a plausible clause, but plausible is not the same as yours. Your firm has a house style, preferred definitions, standard positions on limitation of liability and warranties, and precedents that have survived real negotiations.
A tool that drafts from your own templates and precedents starts much closer to something a supervising lawyer would sign off. One that drafts from generic text leaves the associate to pull it back into shape, which is often the slowest part of the job.
The best first draft is the one that already sounds like your firm.
What it keeps once the matter closes
Every negotiation teaches a team something: which fallback a counterparty accepted, why a cap was set where it was, which clause caused a week of back and forth. In most firms and legal departments that knowledge sits in someone's memory or an old email chain.
A good drafting tool captures those choices as the work happens and keeps them as a clause library the organisation owns. That matters for a mid-sized firm when a senior associate leaves, and it matters for an in-house team that wants consistent positions across the business without a dedicated knowledge function.
Questions to ask before you choose
Can we test it on a live matter? A demonstration on a sample agreement shows very little. Your own precedents and your own counterparties are the real test.
Is it built for the work we do? Broad platforms cover research, disputes and review as well as drafting. For a full-service firm that breadth is valuable. If most of your work is contracts, check that you are not paying for capability you will rarely use.
Can we see the price? Published pricing makes it far easier to build a business case for a partnership or a general counsel.
Where Scriptum fits
Scriptum is built only for transactional work, for firms of twenty to a hundred fee earners and the in-house teams they work alongside. It is a Microsoft Word add-in, it drafts from your firm's own precedents, and the clause choices your lawyers make are captured into a library that belongs to the firm. Pricing is published on our website, starting at £79 per user per month on the Starter plan.
If you are weighing up AI drafting tools, the most useful thing you can do is watch one work on a contract you know well. Book a demo and we will walk through it with you.