In this article:
Overview
The Proofreading feature scans your document for technical mistakes that often go unnoticed during manual review.
Rather than evaluating legal content or style, it focuses on identifying objective, document-level issues that may lead to confusion when sharing or finalising a document.
What does Proofreading detect?
Proofreading can identify issues such as:
Missing or unused defined terms (with AI filtering to reduce false positives)
Errors in number expansions (e.g. 5 (six))
Invalid dates or incorrect weekdays
Unresolved placeholders, highlights, or drafting markers
Broken cross-references
Hardcoded paragraph numbers
❌ When not to use Proofreading
You need to assess legal meaning, compliance, or clause quality
→ Use Playbooks instead.You want spelling or grammar corrections
→ Use Polish Text.
Missing definitions for capitalised terms
This flags capitalised terms that are used more than once but never explained.
In other words, the document refers to something (like “Effective Date”) without saying what it means.
This feature is identical to the warnings you can see in the Definitions feature.
Note that LawVu Draft may occasionally flag words that a human reviewer would not consider defined terms (for example, common capitalised words).
Unused defined terms
This flags terms that are defined but never actually used in the document.
In other words, something is explained (like “Services”) but never mentioned again.
Uncapitalised defined terms
This flags terms that have been defined, but aren't capitalised.
Highlighted words or placeholders
This flags paragraphs that still contain placeholders (such as text in square brackets), coloured highlights, or drafting markers like blobs or fat bullets.
These elements often indicate unfinished or overlooked content, so the proofreading feature flags them for review.
Invalid cross-references
This flags cross-references that are technically broken. These references may appear correct in the Word document but will turn into “Error! Reference source not found” when the document is updated or printed.
This usually happens when a cross-reference points to content that has been moved or deleted and Word has not yet updated the fields.
LawVu Draft checks whether a cross-reference will break when updated or printed. It does not check hardcoded (manually typed) references or assess whether a reference points to the correct or intended content.
Invalid dates
LawVu Draft also detects dates that are invalid (for example, 30 February) or not properly formatted.
Hardcoded paragraph numbers
This flags paragraphs that use manually typed numbers instead of Word’s automatic numbering.
Hardcoded numbering can cause problems when a document is edited, especially if most of the document uses automatic numbering but some paragraphs do not. This often happens when content is added by another author. Proofreading flags these cases so they can be corrected before they cause confusion.
