Investing the time in creating a playbook to standardize the review process is logical where you have in-house or external teams reviewing a high volume of similar contracts. We’ve proven this is a great time saver for legal teams accelerating your contract review process on average by 66% or more.
However, if you look at the billions of contracts that are reviewed or signed every year, not all fall into this high-volume, typical contract category. Whilst standardized, repeatable work is low-hanging fruit for automation, it makes up a fraction of your workload.
For those contracts that are infrequent and bespoke investing time to create a playbook can be a barrier ruling out the gains available from a contract review and analysis technology.
We spoke to a lot of lawyers who told us they would love to use an AI contract review tool, but there’s just not enough time to prepare a playbook and train questions. You need something that’s ready to go from day one. Well, here it is!
ThoughtRiver’s customized checklists recognizes your feedback that to prepare a full deal type policy with Lexible® questions and fully configured internal guidance, external counterparty comments and suggested alternative drafting is not always appropriate.
Customized checklists work much the same way as any other checklist does but can be configured and refined as you work.
Customized checklists can be tailored for specific deal types. When you want to make your own checklist, you can access the Lexible dictionary from the summary panel to search for relevant pre-trained Lexible Fusion™ questions.
As you are the expert, you’ll know the risks you want to identify in the contract, so customized checklists allow you to benefit by using Lexible Fusion™ AI to radically speed up finding answers to your questions in often very long contracts. By adding the question to the summary panel, you can immediately put that question to work on the contracts you’re reviewing.
It doesn't matter whether those contracts are of a type that ThoughtRiver has pre-configured policy playbooks for, such as NDAs, MSAs or consultant appointment letters, because of the way Lexible® has been designed from the beginning with questions which are agnostic as to the type of contract they're looking at, with curated training for very precise points of meaning.
You know that interpretation of the law doesn’t follow a straight line and lawyers in the same team can argue about the interpretation of a single provision. So, in order to guide you through how ThoughtRiver came to the predicted answer, you can navigate through relevant linked clauses of the contract. However, if the provision is missing from the contract, ThoughtRiver will guide you through contextually relevant related clauses so you don’t need to read the whole contract to find where the answer was derived, you can be guided through the document to speed up your review.
Either way, you can build your confidence in the platform by peeking behind the curtain a bit on what the AI identified in the contract in order to make the prediction.
As you review the checklist answers and navigate the contract with relevant clauses, the Lexible question panel provides additional support to help you understand the exact question that was asked and how it was trained. If this question doesn’t hit the mark of what you’re interested in, then you may be inspired to refine your selected Lexible questions.
If you disagree with how ThoughtRiver’s AI has responded to your selected question, then you can edit any answer and save your response.
Communicating with your deal team and counterparties has never been easier. ThoughtRiver’s AI reads your contract, identifies relevant clauses, and extracts the data automatically so in minutes your report is ready to go. Using the report tab on the contract you can choose from pre-configured reports such as a red flag review summary or counterparty issues list response to kick off negotiations without redlines. You also can fully customize the report to suit your needs.
With customized checklist, you can now create precedents that can be used to drive efficiency and lay the foundations for a future playbook. Instead of your legal team transformation being an activity you specifically carve out precious time for, ThoughtRiver’s AI contract review enables you to achieve both in the same motion.
When you’re ready to expand your checklist into a full playbook policy, the key contract facts from your checklist will automatically link to issues raised by the playbook. Each issue’s importance status of ok to showstopper will display as a badge linking you to that issue on the issues list. The checklist plus the issues list provides you an actionable contract to-do list that you can share with your deal team.
The Issues list provides advanced support to your customized checklist by alerting you to things that are problems for the deal type, when they are missing or are problems because they are present. It can be useful to have a playbook policy to standardize internal guidance and drafting with consistency.
ThoughtRiver® and Lexible® are registered trademarks of ThoughtRiver Limited. Lexible Fusion™ is an unregistered trademark of ThoughtRiver Limited.