Introduction: Contract Review
Introducing Contract Review – a powerful tool designed to enhance your legal workflow. AI-powered contract reviews are tailored to help lawyers streamline their contract review process during the Review stage of a workflow. 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, and the document is in the Review stage of its workflow. 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:
General Contract 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.
Precedent-Supported Reviews: 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.
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.
Format of Contract Reviews
The review format for both precedent and non-precedent reviews is:
Executive Summary: A concise, high-level overview of the document review, outlining the purpose of the agreement, the overall risk profile, and any notable findings. This section should provide enough context for a reader to quickly understand the key points without reading the full report.
Risk Summary: A focused analysis of the legal, commercial, and operational risks identified in the review. Risks are summarised in plain language, with an emphasis on their potential impact and urgency. This section prioritises issues that require decision-making, escalation, or further negotiation.
Clause Review Table: A structured table listing the clauses reviewed, with side-by-side commentary where applicable. For precedent reviews, this may include the precedent clause and the counterparty’s clause for direct comparison, along with AI or reviewer recommendations. For non-precedent reviews, it includes the relevant clause text and commentary on acceptability or required changes.
Confirmed Clauses: A list of clauses that have been reviewed and deemed acceptable without changes. This section allows stakeholders to quickly identify which parts of the agreement have been approved and require no further action.
Accessing Contract reviews
1. Locate the relevant document in the Document list, or Upload a new document. To see the Contract review tab, ensure that the document status is either Needs review or is In review.
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.
Troubleshooting
No contract review tab
Contract review will show to all organisations with AI Features turned on. If the document has left the Review stage of the workflow, the Contract review tab will not show. This means that documents in the:
Approve stage
Signing stage
Complete stage
Will not see the tab. The tab will also be hidden for paused or cancelled workflows.
All users will be able to see the Contract review tab when the document is in the Review stage, regardless of whether or not they are lawyers in your organisation.
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 [email protected].