The work
Someone on your team receives a contract from a third party — a supplier agreement, an NDA, a services agreement, a partnership term sheet. They need to check it: does it align with your standard positions? Are there unusual clauses? Is anything missing? Are the liability, termination, and indemnification terms acceptable?
This happens at every level. A lawyer reviewing a complex services agreement. A commercial manager checking a supplier NDA before signing. A procurement lead reviewing vendor terms for a deal that doesn't warrant full legal review. The task is the same: read the contract, find the risk, flag what needs attention.
How AI supports this
AI is effective at the pattern recognition that takes up most of the time in contract review. Give it a contract and your firm's standard positions, and it can produce a structured summary of key terms, flag clauses that deviate from your standards, identify missing provisions, and highlight areas that need human attention — in minutes rather than hours.
The quality of the output depends on the quality of the setup. A well-configured AI review tool with clear instructions and good context produces work that materially accelerates the reviewer's job. A generic prompt produces generic output that still requires reading the whole contract anyway.
What AI needs from you
Your standard positions
What does your organisation consider acceptable for liability caps, termination terms, indemnification, IP ownership, governing law? If you feed AI your standard positions, it can check any contract against them. Without those, it's guessing based on general practice.
The jurisdiction
A clause that's routine in one jurisdiction may carry different significance in another. Tell the AI which jurisdiction applies and it will interpret accordingly. Leave it unspecified and it defaults to general principles that may not match your legal reality.
The commercial context
A non-standard clause from a strategic partner you've worked with for ten years is different from the same clause in a new supplier contract. Give AI the context about the relationship and it can calibrate what's worth flagging versus what's an acceptable deviation for this particular counterparty.
Instructions to review holistically
Contracts are interconnected — a limitation of liability clause means something different depending on the indemnification clause elsewhere in the same document. Instruct the AI to review clauses in the context of the full agreement, not in isolation, and to flag interactions between provisions.
What the human still owns
Even with good setup, some aspects of contract review benefit from human judgment — not because AI can't handle them, but because the stakes warrant a human check.
Unusual commercial structures that don't fit standard patterns. Novel clause combinations your firm hasn't encountered before. Anything where the downside of getting it wrong is significant enough that a second pair of eyes adds genuine value. The reviewer's job shifts from "read the whole thing and find the issues" to "evaluate what the AI found, check the high-stakes areas, and apply judgment where the situation is genuinely novel."