Strong and enforceable contracts define the rights and responsibilities of two parties entering into a business arrangement and delineate a process for dispute resolution. The strength of the relationship boils down to the contract language and the ability of both parties to fulfill their obligations.

As companies increasingly rely on in-house legal departments to handle contract drafting, review, negotiation, and execution, advanced training has become essential. In today’s corporate legal departments, traditional methods of commercial contract review training have evolved to leverage advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline contract review training while ensuring agreements fully adhere to company standards.

Traditional Methods for Commercial Contract Review Training

Corporate legal departments apply a variety of methods for contract review training, including in-house programs and certification through a third party. For instance, Cornell Law School offers online business contract courses that cover the following subject areas:

• Effective contract creation
• Contract interpretation 
• Risks management
• Enforcement 

On course completion, trainees receive a Business Contracts Certificate and 40 professional development hours of experience. A four-credit-hour course costs just over $6,000.   

Lorman Education Services is a private company offering contract law training courses through webinars, audio downloads, articles, and slideshows. Although trainees learn the fundaments of contract structures, core clause concepts, and contract review best practices, they do not receive any certifications or gain company-specific perspectives or practices. 

For a crash course in contract law, brief surveys with titles like “How To Draft, Review, and Negotiate Contracts” are also available. Such surveys may be better than nothing when establishing some familiarity or experience with contract law. However, one hour of on-demand video and a few downloadable resources are inadequate for any effective commercial contract review training program.

Corporate legal departments that want to bolster training should also remember that training investments targeting individual students represent a potential loss if the employee resigns or gets fired. Additionally, human oversight is required to ensure contracts adhere to company standards throughout the training process.  

Innovations in Legal Tech Augment Contract Review Training

LexCheck offers a revolutionary new platform that augments commercial contract review training while ensuring all agreements adhere to company standards. With LexCheck, legal departments evolve beyond endless training cycles, downtime caused by employee turnover, and over-reliance on manual, resource-consuming, error-prone human processes. 

An AI-powered contract review and negotiation platform can automate routine, time-consuming tasks, and compliance concerns to free legal staff for contract escalations, strategic decision-making, and relationship building

Training with an AI Digital Playbook

Most corporate legal departments have one or more company playbooks outlining the rules that govern all contracts within a given category, as well as standard boilerplate phrasing for common clauses and preferred positions. While many companies have migrated to digital copies of their playbooks in MS Word or PDF format, these playbooks are not always searchable or readily accessible for guidance. Even when they are readily available, attorneys must manually cross-reference playbook sections with the contract language being reviewed to ensure terms and clauses are appropriate and enforceable.

With LexCheck’s contract platform, uploaded contracts are analyzed according to a company’s specific playbook and converted to an AI Digital Playbook. Errors, deviations, and omissions are outright revised and/or flagged for review and can assist and automate new employee training on acceptable terms and clauses.

Training with an AI-Powered Automated Contract Review Platform

Contracts traditionally require a lengthy review process—often bouncing back and forth between junior and senior associates with multiple rounds of emails, phone calls, and meetings. And it’s not always easy to reach the right person every time a question arises. New employees, in particular, may struggle to ensure playbook-compliant terms and clauses.

In addition to automatically comparing current contracts against the playbook rules, LexCheck's AI also utilizes past contracts and best practice examples. By leveraging advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP), the AI can deliver context-based revision suggestions to enhance clarity and reduce risks. These playbook-compliant suggestions can provide beneficial feedback to employees who are just learning the ropes. 

And since the AI can review and revise uploaded agreements in less than five minutes, legal departments can save hours, days, and even weeks of work.