Chronic overworking, limited budget and repetitive tasks - sound familiar? The requirements placed on companies and compliance with regulations are increasing while capacity remains the same. Jobs are piling up and there’s no time for value-adding tasks. The challenges faced by legal departments in companies are numerous and delay processes in the whole company. Automated contract review with Contract Review Software provides a solution.
Contract Review Software can help in this situation. Because the program does what the name promises: It assists you in reviewing contracts and even enables staff without any legal training to quickly analyze contracts. But what exactly is Contract Review Software and in what situations is it needed?
What is Contract Review Software?
Contract Review Software usually means an AI-assisted program that helps you review contracts by analyzing clauses, legal concepts and wording, comparing them with legal texts and company standards and checking whether they are permissible. The software standardizes and organizes the review process and makes tedious, manual work easier. The results are summarized separately for users and anomalies and inconsistencies are highlighted. Which clauses comply with your company policies and which are unacceptable?
Contract Review Software is trained to identify specific information from a large number of contracts and summarize it for the users. In this way, the software guides you through the contract and gives instructions on how to deal with clauses that are not compliant with company policy. The company policies are stored in a Contract Playbook so that the software can recognize differences between the language used in the contract and approved terms. This transparently standardizes legal knowledge and company policies and makes them usable as a basis for all contract reviews. Critical clauses can thus be found and dealt with by legals and non-legals without slowing down the review process.
What does Contract Review Software do?
Contract Review Software facilitates the work for all employees of a company as soon as contracts have to be reviewed. Clauses no longer have to be painstakingly read, compared and reviewed individually, but rather are analyzed and evaluated in seconds by the software.
Contract Review Software with AI
In order to enable this, innovative legal tech applications use artificial intelligence (AI). Pretrained AI is especially helpful in the review process. In the training process, which enables the AI to “read” contracts, recognize their language and offer alternatives, contracts are presented to the software in machine learning, results are checked and corrected until the legal tech AI can really support users.
This is where solutions differ in their offers: If the AI of the application is not pretrained, this learning process must be supervised over weeks and months and the results must be corrected by the users.
Contract Review Software in the contract lifecycle
Particularly in the review process of a contract, time can be lost due to necessary consultations between the legal department and non-legals and the negotiation can be delayed. Contract Review Software unleashes its full potential accordingly in the pre-signing phase:
Standards no longer need to be looked up and agreed upon, but are stored by the program and automatically applied to correct existing contractual discrepancies. The AI delivers all relevant contract review results within seconds so that critical parts can be adjusted and the contract negotiation can be completed more quickly.
Pretrained contract review AI, which is a solution that uses pre-trained artificial intelligence to work for you, can usually review contracts on day one following installation. Contract Review Software with AI can now read contracts, not only in the legal department but in all company departments, highlight critical clauses and suggest relevant solutions. It compares the stored company policies with the contents of the contract and highlights which clauses do not comply with the guidelines. At the same time, it offers appropriate wording for correction. All you have to do is apply and adopt them.
Are you looking for support in the contract review process? Then use our legal tech map to find out about the best Legal Tech Companies.
5 reasons to use Contract Review Software
“Contract reviews are expensive. They take a long time and reduce the productivity of legal teams.”
Dr. Marc Hansmann
Suitable Contract Review Software is a great help to all those involved in the contract review process. The burden is taken off legal departments, processes are sped up and tedious work made easier. The software standardizes while maintaining the high quality of the review:
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More capacity: With increasing contract review volumes and growing demands placed on companies, legal departments quickly become overstretched. Jobs pile up, business cutbacks become evident and the legal department quickly becomes a bottleneck in the company. Thanks to the instantaneous analysis, Contract Review Software provides the company with more capacity and frees up time for the legal department to carry out value-adding tasks.
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Less cost: The staff budget is limited, there are rarely free resources in a company. Contract Review Software facilitates the review process so that resources can be optimally used, the review process is shortened and you can conclude contracts with customers more quickly. This effectively saves money.
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Higher quality: The speed of the review is not the only advantage of Contract Review Software. Thanks to the standardization of the review process and transparent organization of your company’s legal requirements, you always comply with your policies and guarantee the quality of the contract review.
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Fewer risks: Fewer contracts fall through the cracks when it comes to carrying out a review. Every contract is reviewed. With standardization, every contract is objectively assessed and checked according to the company policies. This minimizes subjective contract reviews and reduces risks.
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Efficiency gains: Contract Review Software makes work easier. Its use allows more contracts to be reviewed in the same amount of time.
Who uses Contract Review Software?
Legal teams aren’t the only ones to benefit from using Contract Review Software for repetitive tasks. The workflow and contract review process is also made easier for non-legals. The central organization of legal knowledge allows all parties involved in the review process to access and quickly review a contract.
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Staff in procurement who want to ensure that their conditions and business requirements are met in the offer
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Staff in sales who don’t want to keep customers and business partners waiting but still want to check all company policies
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Legal teams, who are relieved of contract reviews by the software, thus gaining time for value-adding tasks
Contract Review Software thus facilitates the workflow between Legal, Sales and Procurement and enables all parties involved in the review process to compare their contract’s clauses with company standards.
Where does Contract Review Software fit in the legal tech sector?
There are legal tech applications in the entire contract lifecycle and beyond. Solutions that cover the entire contract lifecycle and in particular facilitate the organization of contract cycles come under the term Contract Life Cycle Management (CLM). Contract Review Software focuses on the contract review, i.e. on the period of contract negotiation in the so-called pre-signing phase.
For the pre-signing phase, in addition to Contract Review Software, there are also providers that specialize in drafting a contract rather than reviewing it. However, there are also technologies that assist their users in the execution of the contract, i.e. in signing, or facilitate document analysis in the post-signing phase.
Contract Review Software with AI works tirelessly and does not shy away from repetitive work. Nevertheless, even AI makes mistakes sometimes or doesn’t pick up on a formulation within a text. It helps to understand here that AI acts as an assistant in the contract review. And that the person accepts or rejects the AI’s proposals.
Legartis Contract Review Software
The legal tech solutions differ in what they offer, their performance, language comprehension and user experience.
As well as the performance of the AI and its training, the ease of use of the Contract Review Software for users is particularly important. In addition to the advantages of pretrained AI, the focus of Legartis is on an intuitive, easy user workflow that guides users through the contract review.
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Intuitive contract review process: Directly integrated into Microsoft Word as an add-in, the user is guided through the contract review step by step. The list of the review results in the Word add-in provides a quick overview of all critical clauses. Just like with a to do list, users are guided through the contract review.
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Pretrained AI: The AI picks up on critical, incorrect or missing clauses in your contracts from day one. It is continuously trained by our machine teaching team.
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No installation effort: Legartis is installed as a Word add-in with one click.
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Transparency: Adjustments can be transparently listed and tracked in Word as history so that everyone involved knows the status of the review at all times.
Key Takeaways
Contract Review Software not only facilitates the work of the legal department, but also assists everyone involved in the contract negotiation. It standardizes and structures the review process and organizes the results so that users can check them in a clearly summarized form. Contract Review Software provides the option of centrally storing legal knowledge and making it accessible to everyone. The software thus makes repetitive work easier. Legal teams can review contracts more quickly with increased levels of quality and accuracy. Mistakes and risks are minimized and legal departments can work in more detail and more efficiently. This leaves time for strategically important things. And non-legals, too, no longer have to wait to hear back from overstretched legal departments: Contract Review Software speeds up the review process and efficiently supports negotiations with contractual partners.
Would you like to find out more about Contract Review Software? You can find more information in our legal tech webinars, or alternatively you can contact us without obligation. You can find more exciting topics around legal tech and AI in our informative blog. Feel free to take a look!
