Changelog · 2.0 lands Monday 10 August 2026

Everything that moved.

Vern 2.0 is a rebuild, not a refresh. Every change that touched a review is listed below, dated, with the surface it landed on. Including the ones we took out.

VERN 1.x → 2.0 · DIFF 37 CHANGES
+ round diffing read only what moved
+ tracked changes accept or reject, in Word
+ ask vern fetches the clause before it answers
+ email-in forward it, get the reply
+ vern score would it hold up, judged separately
re-reading all 18 every round, from the top
public share pages cut on purpose, see 2.0
Live now · next 3 Aug
1.9 → 2.0
Releases since the rebuild
7
Surfaces touched
5
Breaking changes
0
Filter

2.0
MON 10 AUGUST 2026
MAJOR DATED
DATED FOR MONDAY 10 AUGUST · IN FINAL TESTING

Their redline comes back, and you read only what moved.

The release that makes Vern 2.0. Round diffing is the one we'd been building towards: version three arrives, both scores are recalculated, and you read the four clauses that changed instead of all eighteen again. Everything else here is the housekeeping that a product handling other people's contracts owes you.

NEW
Round diffing

A Compare tab on any review, showing both scores per clause against the previous round. Liability: Escalate → Negotiate. Fourteen clauses unchanged, unread, unbilled.

How it works →
IMPROVED
Email-in and Ask Vern know about rounds

Forward the counterparty's revised version to the same thread and it attaches as the next round rather than a new contract, at the follow-up rate. Ask Vern can be asked what changed since last time.

NEW
Delete a review, and the contract with it

An admin can erase the document, the findings and the message bodies in one action, immediately and without an undo. The record that a credit was spent survives; re-uploading the same file is a fresh review, never a free recall.

IMPROVED
Usage you can reconcile against an invoice

Month-to-month credits consumed, broken down by where the contract came in from, and one invoice line per delivered review.

IMPROVED
Diffs over the API

The same round comparison the Compare tab uses is a documented endpoint, so you can post the deltas into your own deal room.

API reference →
CHANGED
We cut the public share page

It was built, and then removed before release. An unauthenticated page holding contract analysis is at odds with everything else we publish about where your contracts live. A report link now works for anyone in your organisation who is signed in, and for nobody else.

ROUND 3 RE-SCORED · 4 CHANGES · 14 UNTOUCHED 0.5 CREDITS
8.1 LIABILITY
12 58
Capped at 2× after our redline
5.2 PAYMENT
54 31
They pushed it to 75 days
9.4 COVENANTS
41 41
Untouched
17.2 ASSIGNMENT
New clause
Appeared in round three
1.9
20 JULY 2026
MINOR

Real tracked changes, not a comment about one.

Vern's suggested wording now goes into the document as a Word tracked change their counsel can accept or reject, under your name. Word on Windows, on Mac and in the browser.

NEW
Apply as tracked change

One clause at a time, or every suggested wording in the contract under a single tracked edit.

See the add-in →
NEW
Locate, and comment

Jump the cursor to the clause a finding came from, and leave the reasoning as a Word comment. The wording is the redline; the reasoning is the comment. Never both in the same place.

IMPROVED
It never guesses which clause you meant

Where two clauses read alike, or the document has moved on since the review, Vern refuses to edit and leaves a comment instead. Measured against a corpus of deliberately awkward contracts, it has never edited the wrong clause.

IMPROVED
Hard-typed clause numbers stay out of the redline

If somebody typed "8.1" rather than using Word’s numbering, it keeps its formatting and never shows up as part of your change.

NEW
Version-drift notice

If the document has changed since Vern read it, the panel says so and offers a re-check rather than quietly working from the old text.

FIXED
Tracked moves were counted twice

A paragraph the other side had moved appeared twice in the text Vern read. It doesn't now, and there's a regression test so it can't come back.

8.1 LIMITATION OF LIABILITY · TRACKED CHANGE, AS IT LANDS IN WORD ACCEPT / REJECT
Neither party shall be liable to the other for any indirect or consequential loss howsoever arising, without limitation as to amount. Each party's total aggregate liability under this Agreement shall not exceed an amount equal to twice the fees paid or payable in the twelve months preceding the claim.
REAL w:del / w:ins · NOT STRIKETHROUGH FORMATTING PLAYBOOK L-04
1.8
19 JULY 2026
MINOR

The dashboard, the API, and the panel in Word.

Everything you actually touch. Findings stop arriving as a finished report and start arriving as they're scored.

NEW
Findings arrive while the review is still running

A fast pass puts a verdict against every clause within seconds, then the deep pass upgrades each one in place. You start reading before Vern has finished.

NEW
Pair Word with an eight-character code

Generate the code in the dashboard, type it into the panel once. Single use, ten minutes, revocable from settings. No password in Word, ever.

NEW
Recall costs nothing

Open a contract Vern has already read and the review comes straight back into the panel. No new run, no credit, no waiting.

NEW
API v1, with scoped keys

The dashboard is just another client of it. Keys are shown once, stored hashed, and carry only the scopes you grant them.

API reference →
NEW
Playbook editor, with versions that stick

Publishing snapshots a version. Every past review keeps the version it was scored against, so changing a position today never rewrites what you decided last quarter.

See playbooks →
IMPROVED
A failed review says something useful

Provider errors used to reach you verbatim. Now you get plain English, a free retry, and no credit spent.

1.7
18 JULY 2026
MINOR

Two scores, and a citation under each one.

The review engine itself. This is the release the rest of the product hangs off.

NEW
Two-dimensional scoring

Playbook Score for whether the clause matches the position you set. Vern Score for whether it would hold up under UK law, judged independently of what you would accept.

Both scores explained →
NEW
Every finding cites the clause it came from

Quotes are round-tripped against the document. An anchor that can't be verified is dropped rather than approximated, so checking a finding is a glance instead of a re-read.

NEW
Cross-clause pass, and what isn't there

Clauses that contradict each other, like an uncapped indemnity that walks straight through your liability cap, plus the positions your playbook requires that the contract never mentions at all.

NEW
Defined terms are resolved, not skimmed

"Fees" meaning something different in clause 3 than it does in clause 8 is the sort of thing that costs money quietly.

CHANGED
A credit is spent only when a review reaches you

Reserved at intake, spent on delivery. Failures, timeouts and re-runs on the same version are free, and a later round of the same deal is charged at the follow-up rate.

How pricing works →
IMPROVED
Reviews survive a restart

Runs sit on a durable queue. Deploy in the middle of a sixty-page contract and it carries on from where it was, without charging you twice.

1.6
11 JULY 2026
MINOR

Reading the document properly.

Unglamorous, and the reason citations work at all. If "3.1" doesn't survive extraction, nothing downstream can point at it.

NEW
Word's automatic numbering is rendered into the text

Decimal, letters, roman, multi-level, restarts. The number you see in Word is the number Vern cites.

NEW
PDFs, born-digital and scanned

The text layer is read directly where there is one; a thin-text scan routes to OCR instead of being read as three words a page.

IMPROVED
Hidden text is flagged either way

Text hidden by formatting, or white on white, is either excluded and flagged or kept and flagged. Nothing invisible passes through silently.

CHANGED
Documents are parsed with no credentials in the room

Parsing runs in a separate process holding no keys at all. Contract text is treated as data, never as instructions, including the instructions somebody hid in white-on-white.

Trust centre →
CHANGED
Limits stated up front

25 MB, around 300 pages, PDF and Word only, and the file type is sniffed from the bytes rather than trusted from the name.

FIXED
Password-protected Word files fail politely

Detected at the door and refused with a message, rather than dying halfway through and charging nobody's favourite kind of nothing.

1.5
3 JULY 2026
MINOR

Ask Vern.

Chat, but scoped to one contract and made to go and look. Most assistants answer a contract question from memory of contracts in general. This one fetches the clause first.

NEW
Ask Vern

Anchored to one review. It pulls the clause, your playbook position and the surrounding text with tools before it answers, so it quotes rather than remembers, and it can only ever read the contract you have open.

See Ask Vern →
NEW
The same chat inside the Word panel

Same conversation, same thread, without leaving the document. Switch tabs and the answer you were reading is still there.

CHANGED
Chat costs nothing

No credits, no per-message charge, no quota. Asking a follow-up question about a review you have already paid for shouldn't be a decision.

1.4
26 JUNE 2026
MINOR

An address you can forward a contract to.

The intake lane for the people who will never log in. A contract arrives in somebody's inbox, they forward it, and the review comes back as a reply.

NEW
Email-in

Every organisation gets its own inbound address. Forward a PDF or a Word file and the review comes back on the same thread. Anything from a sender you haven't approved is dropped silently, so a spoofed address never gets an answer.

How email-in works →
NEW
Approved senders

Invite the people who only ever forward an email. No seat, no login, revocable in one click, and named individually. We don't trust a whole domain because one person at it is a customer.

NEW
You choose what comes back

The full summary with both scores per clause, or a bare confirmation that it landed and the findings are in the dashboard. Set per organisation, because not everyone who forwards a contract should read the analysis of it.

NEW
Regenerate the address

If it ends up somewhere it shouldn't, an admin can replace it. The old one dies immediately, and a forwarded contract can't be duplicated into two reviews by a retry.

You decide the order

Three things next. Which one first?

We don't publish a roadmap with quarters on it, and we're not going to pretend the order is already decided. Pick the one you'd actually use.

CANDIDATE 01
Vern inside ChatGPT and Claude

Ask the assistant you already have open to review a contract. It calls Vern, so the answer comes from your playbook rather than the model's instinct. What it will do →

CANDIDATE 02
The memo and the redline, exported

The review as a document you can send internally, and the redline as a Word file for the people who will never open the add-in.

CANDIDATE 03
CC Vern into the thread

Vern joins the email negotiation as a supervised junior colleague: reads what arrives, drafts the reply and the redline, chases what's outstanding. Nothing substantive leaves without a named human approving it, and it can never agree terms or sign anything.

Want the next one in your inbox?

One short email per release, written by the person who built the thing. No product newsletter, no drip sequence, and it goes out after the change is live rather than before.