Ask a generic AI what "force majeure" means and it will give you a textbook definition. Ask it whether a specific force majeure clause in your contract covers a supply chain disruption caused by trade policy changes — and things get murkier.
The gap between "knowing what a term means" and "understanding how it functions in context" is what Industry Contexts are built to close.
Why generic AI struggles with specialised documents
Large language models are trained on broad datasets that include legal, financial, and technical content. They know a lot. But knowing that an indemnity clause exists is different from understanding how an uncapped indemnity interacts with a limitation of liability provision in the same agreement.
Specialised professionals — lawyers, analysts, HR managers, engineers — develop intuitions about their domain over years of practice. Those intuitions aren't just vocabulary. They're an understanding of how concepts relate, where conflicts arise, and what questions to ask.
What Industry Contexts actually do
Docutrix's Industry Contexts are pre-configured retrieval and reasoning modes that activate when you select them. They do three things:
**1. Domain-aware query expansion.** When you ask "is this clause standard?", the legal context knows you mean "standard" relative to market practice in commercial contracts — not standard in some general sense. The query is expanded to surface relevant comparisons.
**2. Terminology disambiguation.** In a financial context, "margin" means something very specific. In a contract, "margin" might mean something different. The context prevents the AI from collapsing these together.
**3. Document structure awareness.** Legal contracts have specific structures — recitals, definitions, operative clauses, boilerplate. Financial statements have income statements, balance sheets, notes to accounts. Industry Contexts help the AI understand where in a document to look for specific types of information.
The four contexts
**Legal** covers common law and civil law contract frameworks, regulatory filings, and compliance documents. It understands the hierarchy of contract provisions and can identify conflicting clauses.
**Finance** covers IFRS and GAAP financial statements, regulatory filings (10-K, 10-Q, annual reports), investment memoranda, and credit agreements.
**HR & People** covers employment contracts, policy documents, benefits guides, and the jurisdiction-specific language that differs between employment law in different countries.
**Engineering** covers technical specifications, API references, architecture decision records (ADRs), runbooks, and post-mortems.
What comes next
We're working on additional contexts — Healthcare and Life Sciences is the next one in development — and we're refining the existing four based on the questions our users are actually asking.
If you work in a domain you think deserves its own context, we'd love to hear from you.