Contracts are an essential component of any corporate legal department’s playbook. Fortunately, there are a number of contract review companies offering convenient and highly accurate services for legal teams. But with so many solutions available, it can be challenging to decide on the best fit for your needs. Here we’ll help you narrow down your options by discussing each one in more detail.

What Is the Contract Review Process?

The contract review process starts once a contract has been drafted. It typically involves:

• Review & Comment - A junior-level attorney will usually take the first pass and compare the agreement to previous documents, templates, and playbook standards. The contract is redlined, marked up, and forwarded to a more senior attorney for the final review.
  
  
• Negotiation - The contract is then sent to the counterparty for review and comment. Back-and-forth negotiations occur to ensure the agreement’s are satisfactory to all parties.
  
  
• Final Approval & Signature - The parties make final reviews and sign the contract, initiating the provisions and creating a legally binding document.
  
  
• Maintenance & Renewal - The contract is monitored to ensure both parties live up to their ends of the bargain. At renewal time, the contract is reviewed once again.

How Do I Legally Review a Contract?

A number of issues arise with manual contract review:

• Time - Managing a contract’s lifecycle can take weeks or months to complete. 
  
  
• Lack of Consistency - Without an AI digital playbook, there are no automated guardrails for compliance. The company may make the same errors over and over again. Re-reviewing documents once an error has been detected can be exhaustive.
  
  
• Inefficiency - Back-and-forth emails between parties provide poor visibility into complex issues, making it nearly impossible for teams to determine where bottlenecks exist, let alone why. 
  
  
• Roadblocks Preventing Progress - Junior-level attorneys often become stuck when asking time-constrained senior attorneys questions. 
  
  
• Training Requirements - New reviewers may slow down the process if there is a steep learning curve associated with the company’s playbook standards. 
  
  
• Lack of Contextual Search - When negotiating, it can take hours to search for context in past agreements to justify a recommendation.   

With technology now aiding legal teams every step of the way, review and negotiation processes can be accelerated by up to 90%. Human oversight is still recommended for some contracts, but artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly automating the process by reducing risk, ensuring adherence to standards, and reducing onboarding times.

Who Can Help Me Review a Contract?

For help reviewing a single contract, you may consider outsourcing the work to a law firm and paying by the hour. Contract review companies like Review My Contract and Contract Counsel provide outsourced legal muscle, but they are not scalable.

If you have an effective in-house review team but occasionally encounter high-volume periods or slow downs, you may benefit from enhanced analytics or visibility dashboards offered by companies like Exigent to see where bottlenecks occur.

If you regularly deal with high volumes of documents, then it may make sense to automate your contract review and negotiation processes. A more robust solution afforded by an industry-leader like LexCheck, for example, can enable your operations to scale. 

How Much Is a Contract Review?

The cost of hiring an attorney to review a contract can easily exceed $1000 per contract. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) pricing models are usually based on the amount of contracts that need to be reviewed, number of end users, and duration of intended use. These prices can be extremely fluid as the landscape is very competitive; however, you can lock in a better price by signing a long-term agreement.

Top Contract Review Companies for Streamlining Legal Operations

Although contract review companies are emerging rapidly, it’s important to note that not all software solutions are created equal. What matters is finding one that cuts down on manual contract work and efficiently employs AI to expedite daily workflows. Corporate legal departments can benefit the most from a comprehensive and robust solution that combines AI with leading-edge innovations from fields like Natural Language Processing (NLP). By leveraging these innovations, legal departments can improve overall contract quality while accelerating the contract approval process.