Crisis-oriented or just the usual daily routine, the daily work of legal experts has become more results-driven and requires a greater emphasis on efficiency and improved processes.
Adopting technology can be the first step towards this, especially for reviewing routine contracts like NDAs, SLAs, or DPAs. These contracts specify the binding agreement between parties and form the cornerstone of any major business deal.
Using Contract Review Automation (CRA) will not only facilitate the deal process but also benefit the legal team and bring several significant rewards, such as cutting legal costs, improving accuracy, reducing risk, and getting more legal work done.
While Legal often suffers from a lack of time and resources, it is still required to drive trustworthy performance and resilience, and manage different types of contracting work (including a seamless contract review process). The various agreement types examined regularly by legal professionals may vary in importance and size, from one to hundreds of pages, and include a prolonged and inefficient review process.
Whether undertaken by an associate or a senior lawyer, contract review can take weeks and even months of manpower, and its lengthy process can harm the deal.
In the current era, where the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is common in LegalTech solutions, it’s about time to consider automating contracts.
So, What is AI Contract Review?
Actually, contract “review” covers a wide breadth of tasks that legal professionals, sales, and procurement staff manage in their day-to-day work pre and post signature.
These tasks include examining agreements, but there are several other actions required around contract review; due diligence, redlining according to company policy, tracking and managing all the rights and liabilities of the company (procurement agreements), negotiation, third-party review, etc.
Contract review experts are liable for each clause in the contract after it has been reviewed, so they need to exercise a careful approach, including accurate markup, consistent definitions, and familiarity with the company’s policies.
AI contract review is the solution to all of the above. It allows Legal to enjoy the benefit of accuracy and high efficiency without reviewing the contract manually.
When automating your contract review process, you will allow your legal team to:
1. Cut legal costs:
Let’s say it out loud: reviewing contracts is an expensive process for many obvious reasons. Contract review must rely on the company’s set of legal policies, what we at LawGeex call a “playbook”.
The purpose of legal playbooks is to standardize and streamline recurring legal processes, not only for the order but also to preserve consistency. This might take a while to understand when you deploy an AI contract review solution, and more so when it comes to a manual process. The latter will probably include the review time of several experts until all the policies are implemented.
Unlike other solutions, which can take months to deploy, you can benefit from AI contract review promptly.
A fully automated AI contract review solution can reduce contract review time by up to 80%. Unlike a manual review process, which is lengthy and expensive, an AI contract review solution can now take no longer than a few hours.
2. Reduce Risk:
Reviewing a contract is often stressful, taking into consideration the many risks involved. Imagine a world where you’re able to future-proof and mitigate risk in contracts by ensuring accuracy and consistency. AI contract review marks up missing clauses and gives legal teams an “eagle eye” to spot all the clauses that matter.
And the cherry on the cake is that the AI platform is always up to date so that legal experts, even the recently hired ones, don’t need to worry about whether they are fully up to date on the latest approved fallbacks and alternative language. A huge win for the whole company.
3. Save Time:
Automated solutions don’t just perform faster, they reduce turnaround time from days to the same-day.
When deploying an AI contract review solution, your internal legal policies and protocols will be configured into a playbook. Since contracts are under the tender care of AI, all Legal has to do is focus on other high-impact tasks or just sit back and enjoy the recognition.
Saving Legal’s time means saving time for the company, clients, and business partners, and winning their appreciation.
As mentioned, contracts can be time-consuming and introduce a level of stress. They are also easy fodder for “Finished the review yet?” type emails, which only add to the stress.
With AI contract review, Legal can avoid it altogether.
4. Ensure Quality and Accuracy:
Primarily, applying an AI contract review solution to your workflow will ensure consistency, quality, and accuracy. Now that all your policies are set in one place, there is no chance you or one of your team members will ever miss out on a clause.
Hours of work and tiredness that invariably affect manual review will never stand in the way of quality or consistency again with an AI contract review solution.
AI never sleeps, and it’ll help you be responsive to your teams from New York to New Zealand, Los Angeles to London.
Equally important, with an AI contract review solution, you don’t even have to type in the missing text. It allows you to ‘drag-and-drop’ the required clauses, so the missing clause/sentence will show up where you wanted it.
Don’t worry, you’ll still be able to tweak it to perfection if you want because we know that’s how lawyers are!
5. Empower the team:
The benefits of having a CRA solution in place are many, but the easiest to spot is the fact that it frees up the legal team’s time to deal with more high-value, impactful work. The kind of work they signed up for, to begin with.
Also, an AI contract review solution allows the legal team to be more responsive to other business units that need critical attention to an emerging legal issue, enabling these units to be more agile in response to rapidly changing market conditions, so they’ll also perform at their best. It empowers your legal team to empower other business units across the company. And if you are working in a global enterprise, just imagine the impact of empowering other business teams across the globe.
AI Contract Review is the Legal Team’s Safety Net
AI contract review Is always there to keep Legal at the top of their game, even in days of business uncertainty, reduced headcount, tightening budgets, distractions, and tiredness from binge-watching Netflix’s’ ‘The Queen’s Gambit’.
LawGeex’s team of experts sets up your company’s legal policies in one place, and in a minimum period of time, so you can be up and running, cut legal costs, and drive great results and ROI in the same quarter.
What about those days when you are a bit out of focus? You don’t have to remember everything with an automated contract review platform. The AI does it for you; load it up with all your preferences and let it do its thing.
