Introducing our intelligent Precedent document feature – the ultimate tool to ensure your contracts are always in line with your company’s best practices, when using Plexus AI.
Use precedents to streamline your contract process and to provide intelligent recommendations throughout your contract workflow.
What is a precedent document?
Precedent documents are your company's best-practice, standard templates that can be configured to empower AI during the contract review process.
A precedent document is your company's gold-standard template, armed with the most trusted and widely accepted clauses for your organisation. By associating your precedent documents with each document type in Plexus, your contracts can stay aligned with your company's values, goals, and risk tolerance, making it easier to maintain consistency and minimise risk across all your agreements.
When precedents are configured for your organisation, AI can provide intelligent recommendations, ensuring your contracts stay aligned with organisational standards and streamline the contract review workflow.
Top tip! You can also use your legal contract standards matrices as a precedent document, if these rules are pre-defined for your organisation.
Preparing precedents for upload
Identifying your precedent documents
Your company might already have best practice templates that are used by the broader business to facilitate contract negotiations. You might also have templates that were provided to Plexus if you have purchased and implemented our Automation module in the past. Either example will sufficiently meet the requirements for your precedent document.
Removing personally identifiable information
For the instance where you would prefer to use a contract that you have executed previously, we recommend that you remove any personally identifiable or sensitive information before uploading the files as precedents.
This is because Plexus AI uses the clauses in your precedent documents to recommend changes to new, incoming contracts. As such, any personally identifiable information, such as a salary in an Employment Agreement, should not be included as part of your precedents.
Uploading precedents
To upload precedent files, you will need access to the Settings section of Plexus, and AI features enabled for your organisation.
1. From the Settings, select the Precedents menu option.
2. Drag and drop your precedent file/s onto the designated area, or Browse files to upload them.
3. Assign the relevant Document type for each precedent file.
Once a document type is assigned to a given precedent file, it will be associated to that document type. When this document type is selected on a contract workflow, Plexus AI will use this document to generate recommendations to amend the incoming contract, and to endeavour to more closely align that incoming contract with this best practice file, through intelligent AI-generated recommendations.
From the Settings page, you will be able to view when each precedent file was uploaded, and by who, for record-keeping and maintenance purposes.
Previewing precedents
Once a precedent document is uploaded to your settings, you can click that precedent to preview and download that file out of the system, as required.
To preview a precedent document, click the name of the precedent file. Legal administrators might like to use this functionality to verify that the current precedent document is being used to generate recommendations.
You can click to Download precedents out of the platform, and head Back to precedents to return to the previous page.
Deleting precedents
Generally once a precedent document is uploaded and associated with a document type, to make changes, you will need to delete that precedent and re-upload a new file.
To delete a precedent, hover over the Settings menu and click the Precedents button.
To the right hand side of the precedent that you would like to remove, click the button to Delete.
Follow the prompts to confirm your changes.
When a document type does not have a precedent file associated with it, users won't be able to generate or regenerate recommendations for that document type. We recommend that you re-upload your updated precedent files promptly to avoid disruptions to your workflows.
In deleting your precedent files, any previously generated recommendations will not be removed from existing documents. Once you have re-uploaded your new precedent file, you will need to regenerate any recommendations on your active contracts to see the most up-to-date recommendations.
Troubleshooting
There are various pre-requisites for uploading precedent documents:
File type. Files must be a docx or pdf. We generally recommend docx files for AI features where possible.
File size. Each precedent file should be less than 25MB.
Maximum files. You may upload up to 25 precedent documents at a time.
Need further assistance with your precedent files? Contact [email protected].