Augustus is a Mac desktop app that reviews business contracts. You add contract files, and Augustus produces a plain-language deal memo covering issues worth raising, questions worth asking, and commercial terms that matter.
Over time, Augustus quietly builds up a picture of your standard positions, your recurring counterparties, and the trade-offs you’ve accepted before, so each review starts from what you already know.
I’m Sol Irvine, a transactional lawyer of 30 years, General Counsel, CTO, and software developer. I built Augustus for myself, my peers, and my clients. If you have a Mac, you can download it here.
What makes it special?
Many business people are already pasting contracts into consumer chat tools. Augustus is purpose-built for this task.
It runs on AI API platforms, which carry stronger protections than consumer chat products.
It breaks your contract files into structured data so the model understands contract structure and semantics.
It provides models with search tools that ground the model’s responses and preclude hallucinations.
Whether you need a sanity check, a second opinion, or a fast first read, Augustus helps you engage lawyers, counterparties, and other stakeholders from a position of knowledge.
Why I built it.
The best deal teams I worked with didn’t rely on lawyers to walk them through contract negotiations. They understood the contract terms well enough to take an active role in steering the deal themselves. Anything that helps business leaders stay informed and engaged is a win.
In the right hands, Augustus is a multiplier for a deal team’s recall, consistency, focus, and alignment. It allows non-lawyer stakeholders to track contract terms, risks, and options without requiring an expensive lawyer to write up a memo. That keeps the lawyers aligned with the business, and drives faster, better-informed decisions.
Augustus is the contract intelligence assistant I wanted when I was advising clients, building companies, and managing a huge portfolio of contracts.
Your data stays put.
Your contract files never leave your machine. Augustus never sends your sensitive data to a central database, and shares no data between users.
If you use OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic as your AI provider, portions of your files and your chat messages are sent to them so the model can respond to you. Their API platform terms determine their handling of your data, so please review them carefully. In your account settings with each provider, you can opt out of having your data used to train models.
If you’d rather not involve a third-party AI provider and want your data to stay entirely on your local machine, you can run fully-local models in Augustus through Ollama.
Getting started.
To use Augustus, you’ll need:
A modern Mac. Apple Silicon and at least macOS Sonoma.
Augustus is pre-release software, provided as-is without any guarantees. Augustus and I are not your lawyers. Use the app responsibly, and at your own risk.
About me.
I’m a partner at Yuson & Irvine. I’ve worked in top global law firms. In addition to my client work, I served as General Counsel and CTO at some great companies. I grew up in Seattle, spent most of my career in New York City, and moved to Kyoto, Japan in 2019 with my wife who runs Maana Japan.