Introducing the Contract Review feature – a powerful tool designed to enhance your legal workflow by leveraging the intelligence of precedent documents.
This feature is tailored to help lawyers streamline their contract review process, ensuring consistency, accuracy, and compliance with company standards. It also helps the broader business to have informed conversations about the implications of contract terms.
When your company uploads its best-practice templates to the Plexus Precedents feature, the Contract Review feature allows you to easily compare new contracts against established guidelines, flagging deviations, and offering AI-driven recommendations to address them.
Whether you are managing routine agreements or handling complex negotiations, this feature provides the support you need to conduct thorough, efficient reviews with confidence.
Pre-requisites for using Contract Review
To use the Contract Review feature, ensure the following:
AI Features are enabled for your organisation. To activate AI for your organisation, contact your Customer Success Manager.
Precedent documents are configured for each document type. AI recommendations are exclusively based on your company’s best-practice templates, ensuring accuracy. Without these, recommendations will not be generated.
You have a contract, with a matching document type, uploaded to Plexus to generate the review against. This can be either an existing document from the Document list or a new document.
Accessing Contract reviews
1. Locate the relevant document in the Document list, or Upload a new document.
2. From the relevant document details page, look to the Supporting materials tab on the right hand side of the screen, where you will see a new tab for Contract review.
3. Click the button to Generate recommendations, or Regenerate if you have generated recommendations for the contract previously.
Reviewing the contract with AI
Plexus AI will generate three types of insights for your document.
Acceptable clauses: Acceptable clauses in the contract that are consistent with the position outlined in the precedent document.
Suggestion to modify: A clause that introduces risk, which you might like to modify
For contract review recommendations, Plexus AI will provide the identified clause number, a reason, the current standard and comparison to the precedent document, followed by a recommendation to modify the contract.
It is up to the business to decide whether these recommendations are followed or ignored. The workflow can progress regardless of the action or inaction taken at this step.
Missing clause: A clause that was present in the precedent document, but is missing from the current contract. With each missing clause, Plexus AI will include the reason why that clause was flagged, and a recommended excerpt from the precedent document to bring your document into alignment with your organisation's risk tolerance.
Recommendations will always be displayed for the current version of work.
To modify the document, click the Edit document button to open your file in a new tab where you may modify the document accordingly. You may refer back to the recommendations on the contract review tab at any time whilst making your changes.
Once all required changes are made, click to Regenerate the contract review for additional feedback.
Troubleshooting
Loading times
A contract review can take up to two minutes to load its recommendations, depending on the size of the document.
Message: A precedent document is required to generate recommendations
This message means that a best practice file or negotiations matrix hasn't been uploaded by your organisation as a precedent. As such, recommendations can't be generated for this file type. A member of the legal team with adequate access to Settings will be able to set up the precedent documents required to conduct a contract review.
Message: Return to the main document
Contract review recommendations are generated for the main document only. If you are viewing a sub-document, click to return to the main document.
Message: Recommendations have already been generated
Contract review recommendations are generated for the latest version of the document only. If you have generated recommendations for the current version of work, then you'll need to edit the document, or upload a new version of the document to generate new recommendations.
Message: Resolve tracked changes to generate a review
Contract review recommendations are generated for documents without tracked changes only. To generate a review, edit the document to resolve any outstanding changes, or upload a new version of the document without tracked changes.
Questions about Contract Review or wanting to enable AI features for your organisation? Chat to [email protected].