Introducing the Contract Review feature – a powerful tool designed to enhance your legal workflow. AI-powered contract reviews are tailored to help lawyers streamline their contract review process. It also helps the broader business to have informed conversations about the implications of contract terms.
Whether you are managing routine agreements or handling complex negotiations, this feature provides the support you need to conduct thorough, efficient reviews with confidence.
To use the Contract Review feature, ensure that AI Features are enabled for your organisation. To activate AI for your organisation, contact your Customer Success Manager.
For organisations with AI Features enabled, Contract Reviews are automatically generated for every contract uploaded to the platform.
Plexus has two types of Contract review workflows:
Reviews tailored to company best practices by leveraging the intelligence of precedent documents.
Contract reviews generate automatically for the first version of work uploaded to Plexus, and can be regenerated on a per version basis, provided that version of work does not have tracked changes.
General AI reviews
By default, AI provides a high-level review of files, flagging potential areas for improvement. These insights are drawn from a robust, generalised understanding of contract drafting principles, helping teams refine agreements efficiently.
To further customise and streamline your reviews, you may want to add precedent documents, which can be configured to align with your organisation's risk tolerance.
AI Reviews with best practice precedents
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.
With precedent documents, AI recommendations are tailored to your company’s preferred contract standards, ensuring alignment with your internal guidelines.
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 second 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
For organisations without precedents configured, Plexus AI will generate general recommendations for your contract under relevant headings.
For organisations with precedents, 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 a few minutes to load its recommendations, depending on the size of the document.
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.
Message: Failure to generate recommendations
You may receive this message for the following reasons:
Bulk upload: The contract review feature does not support files uploaded via the bulk upload tool.
Legacy document: The contract review feature does not support older files uploaded prior to the release of our AI capabilities.
Timing: If your precedent or uploaded file was added recently, please wait and try again later. This timing error is more likely to occur with larger files.
Questions about Contract Review or wanting to enable AI features for your organisation? Chat to support@plexus.co.