AI knows your industry. It doesn't know your organisation. Playbooks change that.

The problem with AI that doesn't know you

Plexus Counsel is already a capable AI legal assistant. It understands contracts, answers questions accurately, and helps both legal and business users get to answers faster. That's real value, and our customers tell us they feel it.

But there's a ceiling to what generic AI can do and most organisations hit it faster than they expect.

When a business user asks a generic AI chat a question about payment terms, it gives a technically correct answer. What it can't do is tell them your payment terms. Your standard position. Your 30-day preference and 60-day fallback. The escalation threshold that triggers a legal review.

Playbooks and Plexus Counsel addresses this.

What Playbooks actually does

Playbooks lives in Plexus Counsel's Settings, alongside Knowledge, the repository where you store your internal documents, precedence and reference material.

Think of Knowledge as your documentation: the source of truth for your organisation's standards. Playbooks works hand in hand with Knowledge. It lets you provide more context around your organisation’s precedence, how to use it, when to use it, and what it means.

Though Playbooks is not reliant on Knowledge, you can use Playbooks without precedent documents, and directly advise Plexus Counsel on specific situations, approaches, output style, tone, or any other customisation you need for your organisation.

To build a Playbook, an admin names it, defines its objective, and links any relevant Knowledge files. From there, Plexus AI guides them through a targeted Q&A to turn those inputs into precise instructions. No prompt engineering. No technical expertise required. Your lawyers define what they want, Plexus handles the rest.

Once active, a Playbook shapes every Plexus Counsel interaction across the platform, invisibly and consistently, for every user.

The future of Playbooks

Today, Playbooks only applies to the output of Plexus Counsel, however the goal is for your configured standards to be felt across the entire Plexus platform over time, and for you to be able to customise all of the AI across the Plexus platform.
We'll get there. For now, Playbooks shapes the Counsel chat experience, which is where most dynamic and nuanced queries from legal and business teams happen.

The compounding value case

One thing I find genuinely interesting about Playbooks is what it does over time, not just at the moment of configuration.

Every Playbook an organisation builds encodes more of its legal judgment into the platform. Risk appetite. Commercial positions. Escalation logic. Compliance standards. The knowledge that currently lives in the heads of experienced lawyers and that gets lost when they leave, or when institutional memory fades.

The more you invest in your Playbooks, the more attuned Counsel becomes. It's not a set-and-forget feature. It's something that compounds as your organisation puts more into it.

We want Plexus to feel less like a tool your legal team uses, and more like a platform that knows your company. Playbooks is one of the clearest steps we've taken in that direction.

How to get started

Playbooks is available now for all customers with AI enabled. Your Plexus admin can access it via Settings > Playbooks in Plexus Counsel.

We'd recommend starting with one or two high-volume, well-understood areas, payment terms, NDA signing authority, standard escalation thresholds, before expanding. Get a feel for how the configuration shapes outputs, test it against real queries, and iterate from there.

If you have questions or want a walkthrough, reach out to your Customer Success Manager or drop us a note at [email protected]. We're listening