How AI Helps with the Contract Review Process

Contract review is one of the leading causes of bottlenecks in the contract process. Sometimes it takes way too long to get everything in order and ensure you’ve covered all your bases so you don’t open yourself up to more risk, especially in high-value deals. But what can take human reviewers hours or days only takes artificial intelligence (AI) a few seconds. This is why AI contract review is an ace for lean legal teams.

In the last few years, AI has made strides in enabling efficiency in the legal department, despite in-house counsel’s increasing workload. By taking on the more time-intensive tasks and making quick work of contract analysis, AI contract review allows legal teams to clear up bottlenecks in the pre-signature phase of the contract process.

When it comes to contract review, here are a few ways AI can help make it easier.

Let AI do the heavy lifting

Consider AI as a pivotal tool in your legal operations toolbox, efficiently analyzing contracts to identify areas that require your attention. This approach doesn't aim to replace the critical judgment and in-depth understanding you provide; rather, it seeks to enhance your capabilities. By deploying AI for initial contract reviews, you can more effectively allocate your time and resources, focusing on the most pressing issues. This method not only streamlines your workflow but also allows you to apply your expertise where it's most needed. Ultimately, while AI can guide and inform your decisions by highlighting potential concerns, the responsibility for making the final, definitive judgments rests with you. It's your insight and expertise that ensure adherence to the highest standards of fairness and integrity. Let AI assist in the preparatory work, but remember that the essential decisions depend on your informed judgment.

Cut out tedious, manual contract review and save time during redlining

Once a contract is reviewed and out the door, you can continue to use AI to make it easier to understand and report on what is in your executed agreements. Here’s just a few ways you can use AI for fast and easy contract analysis: 

• Quickly review an AI-generated summary of counterparty redlines to understand their position and changes at a glance
• If you see something on 3rd party paper that violates your preferred playbook, let the AI know what you’re looking to change and it will generate suggested language for you
• legal teams can focus on key contract areas with high-level outlines of the most important information.

Analyze trends and inconsistencies

AI is also helpful in spotting trends that are hard for you to see. On a well-trained model built specifically for legal, this level of discernment is an asset to your team. Using AI, you can quickly spot anomalies in your contract terms, the differences in contracts of the same type, and whether or not your key terms are consistent across agreements. This saves you a world of long-term trouble while streamlining your short-term process. 

Automate repetitive tasks

While AI is not great at thinking autonomously, it is exceptional at automation. This is what makes AI a great assistant. It can do the boring work faster and get you everything you need to do your job better. Categorizing contracts, generating reports based on contract data, and organizing all contracts with a certain clause are all great uses for legal AI. The due diligence process, for example, is a crucial legal task that requires a heavy investment of time. But with AI sorting through your documents and data freesup your to-do list. 

Takeaways

Contract review requires a strong attention to detail, but not at the expense of everything else. Leverage legal AI to speed up your contract reviews, spot trends more quickly, and execute agreements more seamlessly. By acting as your assistant, legal AI only brings critical things to attention, freeing you up to focus on more strategic initiatives. Automating  contract review wit LinkSquares AI can help low-capacity legal teams increase their bandwidth and accomplish more with less.

Ready to see it in action? Contact us today.