Draftable Legal Quick Start Guide

This step-by-step guide will help you set up Draftable Legal and run your first comparison in minutes.

What is Draftable Legal?

Draftable Legal is a document comparison (Redline) solution that makes it easy to see what’s changed between two documents. Draftable Legal is built specifically for lawyers with additional features to assist legal users in comparing documents.

Simply select two versions of a document and Draftable will show you every single change in an easy-to-understand viewer.

Setting up Draftable Legal

1. Download the Draftable Desktop application here: https://draftable.com/desktop/download/

2. Run the installer & follow the prompts

3. Activate the product by entering your Draftable Legal product key

   1. If you already have a license, your product key should have been sent to your email.
   2. If you want to start a trial, request a demo here: https://www.draftable.com/draftable-legal
4. That’s it! Draftable Legal is now set up & ready to use.

Running your first comparison

1. Start Draftable Legal

2. The New Comparison launcher will appear

   
3. Select two documents you want to compare
   The older/original/source document goes on the left
   The newer/revised/modified document goes on the right

4. Select the comparison type as Redline in Draftable

   
5. Hit Compare

6. Draftable will now be comparing the documents. This can take from a few seconds up to a few minutes, depending on the contents.

   
7. Once the comparison is complete, the comparison results will load in our redline comparison viewer window

Reviewing comparison results

Redline viewer

The Redline comparison viewer makes it easy to review changes.

The Change List is shown on the right-hand side of the Comparison Viewer. You can read more about Change List features here.

You can toggle the Change List on or off by selecting the button below highlighted.

At the top of the ribbon menu within the comparison viewer, are all your comparison output options.

These options allow you to quickly and easily share comparisons via your preferred method or DMS. A quick summary of these options are:

• Open the results directly in your preferred Word processor or PDF reader.

  

• Save the comparison result to your computer.

• Save to DMS, e.g. iManage, NetDocuments

• Print a hard copy of the comparison results.

• Copy to Clipboard and save the comparison output to your clipboard.

• Email the comparison results and/or the input documents using Outlook.

For more information about these specific output options, please see our Using Draftable section of our Knowledgebase. 

Other Comparison Types

You can read more about how to select the right Comparison Type here. Below we explain three other Comparison Types that are used for legal comparisons of Word documents (docx) and PDF files.

Side by Side

This allows you to compare two documents and have them shown on a comparison screen in a Side by Side view. This can make it very easy to see the differences between two documents and works best for PDF files (but Word files are also supported). Side by Side comparisons also have the option to create a comparison output (or export), and is very useful when comparing Excel and PowerPoint files. 

Tracked Changes in Word

The Tracked Changes comparison type will generate a Word document (.docx) with the changes marked up as Track Changes. Once ready, you will be prompted to either save or open the output. This will open in Word and let you use Word’s inbuilt Tracked Changes functionality to navigate through changes & accept/reject changes.

Redline in Word

This Comparison Type is designed for users who prefer to work in Word but require a redline that does not contain any tracked changes metadata. It creates a comparison output as a Word (docx) file with static markup (i.e. the text is altered to reflect the markup but there are no ‘changes’ to review). This is particularly useful when using metadata cleaning tools that would otherwise remove tracked changes information.

Advanced steps

For further advanced steps see the below articles:

Setting up your integration with iManage

Customizing the side-by-side comparisons options

Customizing the Redline options and markup styles

Comparing PowerPoint with Draftable Legal

Comparing Excel files with Draftable Legal