In this article:
What is the Summarise feature?
The Summarise feature helps you quickly understand lengthy documents and extract key information efficiently by generating a concise overview of selected text or documents.
You can summarise:
Text selected directly in your Word document
Uploaded files or documents from LawVu (e.g. Word or PDF files)
By default, summaries are short, plain‑text paragraphs. However, you can also create structured summaries - such as summaries organised by clause or timeline - to suit your needs.
✅ Use it when you want to:
Quickly understand key points without reading the full document
Focus on the most important information
Work across different file types (selected text, Word documents, PDFs)
Customise summaries to match your workflow (e.g. clause-based or timeline formats)
⚠️ Avoid using it when:
You need full legal or technical detail (summaries may omit specifics)
You are working with very short text where summarisation may remove important context
Creating summaries
1. Select or upload documents
You can summarise text directly from your open document or add a file to summarise.
Select text in your document to summarise a specific section
Click Upload to add a file from your device
Click Fetch documents to select a file from LawVu
2. Choose summary type
You can choose how the summary is structured. By default a summary is 'Simple' - a short, single paragraph.
However, more options are possible. Some examples are Per clause or Timeline.
3. Language
Whenever you create a summary, you always have the option to select the language of the summary in advance.
For example, if the source document you want to summarise is in English and you want a summary in Spanish, German, etc., you can easily select this option.
4. Configure your own summary type (optional)
You can configure your own summary type:
Select Configure
Create new summary type
Use the summary format editor to define the structure.
For example, you can create a table‑based summary with columns for Date, Party, and Content, generated from the selected text or uploaded document.
Note that you can also configure already existing summary types in the same way as described above.
You will also notice you have the option between Single summary and Multi-summary.
Single summary: this will give you one summary based on the chosen summary type
Multi-summary: this will allow you to generate multiple summaries at once. For example if you already know you need both a simple and a per clause summary of your document, you can do it via Multi-summary in one go instead of doing it one by one.
5. Click the Summarise button.
Once you’re satisfied with the summary, you can insert it directly into your document or export it to Word.
Can I summarise multiple files at once?
No. Summarise works with one document or one text selection at a time but you can upload multiple documents and switch between tabs to view the summary for each.
