Legal
Contract review
A contract-review assistant that flags the clauses deviating from the firm's standards and links each flag to the exact clause text — so a lawyer reviews by exception, not line by line.
- LlamaIndex
- pgvector
- OpenAI
- Go
first-pass review time
clauses linked to source
In short
- Reviewers see the deviating clauses first, not every clause.
- Every flag links to the exact clause text and the standard it breaks.
- The firm's playbook is the source of truth — the model checks against it, it doesn't invent rules.
The engagement
- Sector
- Legal services
- Company shape
- Mid-size firm, high contract throughput
- Engagement
- Review assistant + playbook encoding, ~12 weeks
Anonymised by policy
The challenge
Associates opened each contract and read it end to end to find the handful of clauses that mattered — non-standard indemnities, missing limitations, off-market terms. The valuable work was the exceptions, but the time went to re-reading boilerplate.
A generic summariser was worse than nothing: a plausible summary that misses a buried carve-out is a liability. Any tool had to check against the firm's actual standards and point to the exact text, not paraphrase.
The approach
- 1Encode the playbook
The firm's clause standards and fallback positions were encoded as the checklist the assistant reviews against — the rules are the firm's, not the model's.
- 2Retrieve, then compare
Each clause is matched to its standard via retrieval and compared, so a deviation is grounded in the firm's playbook rather than a guess.
- 3Flag by exception, cite the text
The assistant surfaces only clauses that deviate, each linked to the exact contract text and the standard it breaks.
- 4The lawyer decides
Every flag is a prompt for review, never an edit — the assistant narrows attention, the lawyer makes the call.
The solution
The assistant parses a contract into clauses, retrieves the matching firm standard for each, and flags the ones that deviate — non-standard, missing, or off-market — with a link to the exact text and the standard it breaks. The lawyer reviews the exceptions instead of the whole document.
Because it checks against the firm's encoded playbook and cites the source clause, a flag is verifiable in a click, and the boilerplate that used to eat the review time is handled by exception.
The system we built
- Parsecontract → clauses
- Retrieve standardfirm playbook, pgvector
- Compareclause vs. standard
- Flag + citedeviations only
- Lawyer reviewby exception
The results
first-pass review time
vs. full manual read-through
clauses linked to source
every flag cites the exact text
silent edits
the assistant flags, the lawyer decides
Data & safety
- Guardrails
- The assistant flags for review and never edits a contract; the firm's playbook is the only rule source.
- Traceability
- Every flag links to the exact clause text and the standard it breaks.
- Data handling
- Contracts stay within the firm's environment; no document data leaves their systems.
The stack
- LlamaIndex
- pgvector
- OpenAI
- Go