Why AI Redlining Elevates Contract Review

It’s the day before the quarter ends, and Sales just dropped a third-party MSA into your inbox for a customer who is ready to close. Situations like this are common for in-house legal teams, who are under constant pressure to turn around contracts quickly while maintaining high legal standards. Even when the business needs immediate results, ensuring a draft meets organisational standards takes time. To better serve as a strategic advisor, lawyers can move beyond the manual mechanics of review and accelerate the entire contracting process.

The Challenge of Manual Review

When lawyers rely on manual review, they often end up reinventing the wheel with every new draft. Capturing the organisation’s standards or checking for market consistency is a significant task when done by hand. Moving toward an automated approach reduces the risk of inconsistency and ensures that every lawyer on the team has a clear, up-to-date view of what "standard" looks like for the business today.

Making Contract Knowledge Actionable

Many legal teams use a CLM to store completed contracts, but CLMs don’t eliminate the manual work required to review agreements. However, the data needed to move a deal forward is scattered across thousands of past negotiations. An AI intelligence layer brings that collective knowledge directly into Word while you’re drafting or reviewing a live contract, so you can access insights instantly and make faster, more confident decisions.

The Solution: An AI Intelligence Layer

To accelerate these workflows, legal teams can implement an AI intelligence layer. This is a system that sits on top of your historical work, making it active and searchable. Rather than just a repository, an intelligence layer acts as a real-time bridge between your department's collective memory and your current draft.

Efficiency comes from being able to tap into that past data instantly to speed up a review, enabling you to reclaim the time you need to be a strategic partner to the business.

What an Effective AI Intelligence Layer Actually Does

If you are evaluating how to expedite contract review, the goal is to make your history actionable so you can automate redlining without leaving your workflow. This requires a few key features:

• Trusted Redlines: Effective AI suggestions are built on your own data. A lawyer should be able to see exactly which past contract a clause came from, ensuring trust through full traceability.
• Live Standards Sync: Standards should evolve as your business does. An intelligence layer can update automatically as new deals close, ensuring your automated redlines reflect your most recent and relevant negotiations.
• Workflow Integration: To stay efficient, intelligence should meet the lawyer where the work happens—inside the document. This keeps the focus on the draft rather than navigating between systems.
• Institutional Consistency: Technology should empower every lawyer to work from the same collective expertise. Automatically generated playbooks capture that knowledge, helping the team review contracts faster and with greater confidence.
• Full Controllability: Automation shouldn't be a "take it or leave it" proposition. You need the ability to steer the AI with the ability to override suggestions, refine the logic, and ensure the final output reflects your specific legal judgment for that deal.

Shifting the Focus to Strategic Advisory

Modernizing how you apply contract standards is about elevating the work, not just simplifying it. By automating the routine friction of redlining and standard-checking, you can redirect your energy toward the high-level strategy the business values most.

The addition of an AI layer ensures that your team's collective expertise is available exactly when needed. When you can align a draft against organisational standards in seconds, you accelerate the contracting cycle, allowing you to spend your valuable time acting as a strategic partner to the business.