Humans, by nature, can be resistant to change. Often, though, change offers new opportunities. The struggle between tradition and innovation is felt acutely in corporate legal departments when contract review and negotiation processes become tedious and inefficient. Legal AI contract review has emerged as a game-changing opportunity for legal departments willing to innovate.

Although the myriad options can seem confusing at first, most legal AI contract review platforms offer core benefits that will:

• Alleviate burdensome work
• Automate and expedite contract processes
• Streamline training for contract analysis
• Save on costs.

Contract analysis platforms are invaluable assets for overcoming legal department challenges, cutting costs without reducing quality, and remaining competitive.

Alleviate Burdensome Work

Contract review is complex and crucial work that requires unique legal expertise. Lawyers are not merely proofreaders—they are also translators who can break down complicated legal language into risk assessments in business terms. 

Contract reviewers know what’s at stake and that a single vague or misplaced word can result in an unenforceable or burdensome contract. One erroneous date or decimal point can make it impossible for a company to fulfill its promises. Yet, even for the shrewdest and most experienced legal minds, carefully combing through a lengthy and dense contract while pressed for time and stretched thin can be mind-numbing. 

Often, a junior associate or non-legal professional may take the first crack at editing a contract. These reviewers must be thoroughly trained, and they must continually reference the company playbook of standards and past contracts for context. And despite their training and credentials, and having the playbook by their side, they may, after a few days of labor-intensive work, still have to escalate to senior attorneys.

Automate and Expedite

Automating contract review, negotiation, and risk analysis offers tremendous advantages for corporate legal departments. Instead of review and negotiation bottlenecks and back-and-forth email chains that require days to resolve, legal departments that implement contract automation solutions like an AI-powered contract review platform can experience benefits like: 

• Dramatically reduced time to approval
• Reductions in contract escalations from 90% to 10%
• Automated contract risk analysis.

Attorneys can work hands-on with legal AI contract review platforms to automate common changes. For instance, they may draw up a rule such as: “Where a contract says January 1, 2021, update it to January 1, 2022.”   

A sophisticated AI contract review platform can even apply different instructions to similar issues depending on the contract type and which party the company is in the contract. For example, the AI could be instructed to insert the company's standard suspension provision if no such provision is present. Moreover, if an existing suspension provision exists, the AI could revise according to set conditions like the following:

1. That the Company may suspend the services if not paid within 30 days following a request;
2. The number of unpaid days that must pass before the Company may suspend the services to no greater than 30.
3. That the Customer preventing the Company's access to the worksite is a justification for suspension.

Increase Legal Training and Save on Costs

Investing in a legal AI contract review and negotiation solution is a way of investing in the future. Training a junior associate is necessary, but when the associate leaves the company, all of their knowledge and training leaves, too. With an AI-powered contract platform, corporate legal departments can leverage an AI Digital Playbook to assist in new employee training while ensuring that agreements are fully compliant with company standards.

In addition to more efficient training on the company playbook, legal AI contract review technology can perform the initial contract review—rather than a junior associate or an outsourced team. By implementing an AI-powered contract platform, early AI adopters have reduced training costs by as much as 99%.

Explore the Advantages of Legal AI Contract Review

LexCheck provides a comprehensive solution for automated contract markup and negotiation with technology that employs the latest advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI.

Here are a few of the most common questions we receive from corporate legal departments curious about innovating their processes.

• How does AI contract review work? An AI solution can be as easy to use as email. Simply upload or email a new draft to the platform to receive the fully-redlined contract in minutes, along with context-based suggestions and auto-corrected terms and clauses. 

• Can AI read contracts? Yes, AI can “read” and compare contracts using NLP technology. Learn more about how NLP technology has advanced in recent years to enable machine reading like never before. 

• Can AI write a contract? AI does not “write” contracts, although there are tools for building clause libraries and templates. Our platform can effectively “negotiate” a contract by making recommendations based on company guidelines and past successes, inserting context along with the suggestions to support and guide reviewers in their decision making.

• What is an AI contract? An AI contract is fully-digitized and connected to a repository of past contracts, enabling the AI to apply playbook standards and pre-programmed rules. Automated reminders let you know when a contract will expire, while automated processes allow you to update contracts in bulk as needed.

There are many legal AI tools available. Most of them focus on streamlining specific parts of the process, like digital document storage, e-signature, or risk evaluation. Be sure to check out our Guide To Contract Analytics and Review Solutions for a few key questions to ask before choosing a platform. .