Valeur.Products · Clause Memory
Finds the familiar clause because it is on record, not because someone remembers it.
The person reading a contract for the first time usually recognises the clause that burned them once before. Recognition is not the problem. The problem is that the recognition lives in one person’s memory, and it leaves the room when they do. This capability puts the clause patterns your organisation has already reviewed into a written library, and marks them when they appear in the text in front of you.
There is no language model in the matching path. Empty text and an empty library produce zero matches, not a guess.
Four things, and in none of them does it step outside the record.
Everything it does rests on one source: the clause patterns your organisation has already read and put on record. What is not in the record is not produced here — not guessed at, and not borrowed from a similar pattern.
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01
Puts what was learned once on the record
A finger burned in one negotiation usually stays in the memory of whoever was in that negotiation. Once the pattern is in the library the same knowledge sits in the organisation’s record, and stops depending on that person’s calendar.
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02
Marks the same pattern in a new text
As the contract in front of you is read, the clauses carrying a wording recorded in the library are marked. Marking does not reorder the text: you see what was found beside the clause it was found in.
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03
Shows which record each mark came from
A mark never arrives on its own; beside it is written which pattern matched and which wording in the text was caught. So you can read the ground before accepting the mark, and take it to your own counsel with that same ground attached.
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04
Writes what it does not know into the answer
If the library is empty the result is zero matches — and next to that zero it says the library is empty. A bare zero would let the reader think the contract is clean, when all it says is that there is nothing to look with yet.
Four steps, and not one of them invents what the library does not hold.
The order below follows a contract from the moment it reaches the table to the moment it is signed. Under each step is what that step cannot do; collecting the limits into a single caveats block at the foot of the page would be putting them where they do not get read.
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01
Your organisation decides what enters the library
Patterns enter the library as reviewed packs. The product does not choose which clause is worth recording; your legal and contracts team does, and what they choose stands in writing.
LIMITThe product does not derive patterns by itself. If nobody has put anything in, the library is empty and stays empty; that is not a setup gap, it is the consequence of who makes the decision.
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02
The new text is read against the recorded wording
Case is folded away, then the question is whether the recorded wording occurs in the clause text. No ranking, no scoring, no inference: the same clause against the same library returns the same result every time, and results come back in the library’s own order.
LIMITA clause that creates the same obligation in entirely different words is not caught. For it to be caught, that wording has to be in the library too; no similarity is drawn between words.
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03
You see where to start the review
In a long contract the first hour goes on deciding where to look. Marked clauses shorten that decision: the places your organisation has stopped at before are there because it stopped at them.
LIMITAn unmarked clause does not mean a clean clause; it means there is no counterpart in the library. The job of reading the whole contract does not go away.
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04
Your team makes the call, with the ground in hand
A hit is more reliable than a free guess because it rests on a reviewed record, and the record can be seen. What comes after is unchanged even so: the person reading the clause makes the assessment.
LIMITThat a hit is not a verified legal opinion is fixed in the code and travels with every result. That sentence is not a separate disclaimer page; it is part of the answer the product returns.
Three limits, and none of the three is on a roadmap.
None of these is a gap waiting to be closed. The first is a property of the method, the second is a deliberate refusal, the third is where the product stands today — and all three stay readable on every answer.
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01
It searches for wording, not for meaning
The test rests on the recorded wording occurring in the text. The consequence is this: the capability’s coverage is the library’s coverage. It widens as patterns are added and does not generalise on its own — which is why maintaining the library is the organisation’s work rather than the product’s.
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02
A hit is not a verified legal opinion
It is not usual for a product to write this distinction into its own output, and that is exactly why it is written. A hit says that a record your organisation reviewed also occurs in this text; it does not say the clause is risky, or unenforceable, or that it should be renegotiated. A lawyer makes that assessment.
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03
The library starts empty on your side
Patterns load from each organisation’s own store, and on day one that store is empty. This page does not say how many patterns the library holds; if it did, the number would be invented for a library that does not exist yet. It runs while empty too: returning zero matches together with the fact that the library is empty.
Four questions, in the order they get asked.
What does the product return while the library is empty?
Zero matches, and with it the fact that the library is empty. The two come back as one answer, because a bare zero gives the impression that the contract is clean. The emptiness is written inside the answer, not on a separate warning line.
Is a language model used in matching?
No. The path is a containment test performed after case is folded away, and it holds no model call. The same clause against the same library returns the same result every time; results come back in the library’s own order.
Does a hit prove the clause is risky?
No. A hit says only this: a pattern your organisation has already reviewed also occurs in this text. That the result is not a verified legal opinion is fixed in the code and travels with every result. Whether the clause is risky is decided by a lawyer looking at the specific contract in front of you.
How does a pattern get into the library?
As reviewed packs, and the organisation makes the call. For a pattern to be matchable, both its identity and the wording to look for must be present; if either is missing the row is skipped. An incomplete row is not completed, not guessed at, and not used as though it were half a rule.
Bring two clauses that have burned you once.
Bring a contract you are holding and two clauses that have burned you before. We will set up together how those patterns go on record and how they get marked in a new text — and because the library is your record, you write its first two rows as well.