Category: Artificial Intelligence

Legal contract review and drafting can take up to 70% of an in-house legal department’s time. The process is often painfully tedious and repetitive – especially if it is paper-based or spread across multiple systems like emails and private drives. Without a more effective digital enablement, the process to review and draft legal contracts is slow and inconsistent, requires enormous attention to detail and continues to be prone to costly errors. These challenges directly impact a company’s ability to reach favorable contract outcomes and achieve business objectives.

With ever-increasing pressure on legal teams to do more with less, enhancing contract efficiency through automation and the latest technologies represent a significant opportunity to improve business performance.

Artificial intelligence, specifically legal contract AI, has the power to deliver significant productivity gains and allow lawyers to utilize their skills, experience and talent on higher-value business objectives. Onit undertook a study of its AI for the pre-signature contract phase, ReviewAI, to determine just how much it can help and found commendable results (you can read more about them here.)

Key takeaways from the contract AI study include:

• Testers found that ReviewAI accelerated legal contract reviews and approvals by up to 70% and increased legal team productivity by more than 50%.
• New users were immediately 34% more efficient with their time and 51.5% more productive. The average midsize company employs 28 lawyers who review 4,850 contracts annually. Unlocking more capacity – up to 51.5% – means those same lawyers can now process 2,498 more contracts annually. It’s like adding nine lawyers to your team.
• The team leader, a senior lawyer, was able to reallocate 15% of his time from contract work and team management to higher-value activities.
• The efficiency and productivity gains from using ReviewAI increased over time, allowing corporate legal departments to optimize team performance, reallocate resources to engage the business better and reduce the amount of contract work handled by external counsel.

To learn more about legal contract AI software, contract review and drafting, read about the study’s results.

Sometimes, a company is so accustomed to a process that its participants don’t realize how manual it actually is. This is commonly the case for contract management review.

Many corporations rely on vastly manual processes to handle contracts, such as cutting and pasting into templates, emailing, searching for documents and saving to multiple drives. However, a manual approach for contract management can come with significant risks such as inadequate delivery to customers, failure to enforce negotiated supplier terms, time lost from disorganization and errors and additional work due to inefficient processes.

One area of particular concern is contract review. When combined with highly manual or ineffective processes, it has the potential to hinder the execution of powerful agreements that lead to increased revenue, enhanced partnerships and valuable purchases. In short, a nickel – albeit a necessary nickel for legal review – is holding up a dollar.

ReviewAI and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Legal teams have long been asked to do more with fewer resources and a shrinking budget – all while taking on more work. This is not a scalable process without technology. Artificial intelligence and advancements in machine learning, natural language processing and deep learning are evolving the legal profession as we know it.

While legal professionals’ expertise and judgment will always be the core of legal processes, AI can provide pre-work much in the same way that a paralegal or junior lawyer might mark up a document or run a checklist before a partner’s final review. As a result, corporate legal departments can use AI to decrease the time it takes to review contracts, increase productivity, reduce risk and save time.

Here are five ways AI can accelerate the pre-signature contract review process.

1. Self-Service ReviewAI

With AI, legal professionals can slash the time for a first-pass review from days or hours to mere minutes. A business user can request a standard contract or submit a third-party contract for initial review via email or a web portal. AI learns corporate standards from transaction histories and feedback and then reviews and redlines contracts and returns them in Microsoft Word – often within two minutes.

2. High-Volume/Low-Edit ReviewAI

Some contracts, like nondisclosure agreements, require near real-time turnaround and often do not depart from standard terms. They’re high-volume and low-edit documents – prime candidates for AI review. Instead of an attorney handling contracts like this, AI can review the contract and suggest revisions to bring it to corporate standards if necessary. From there, the NDA or similar contract can be tendered directly to the other party or undergo one last round of internal review if deemed necessary. Lawyers can spend time on projects that bring more value to the company.

3. Complex Contract Drafting and Negotiation

Master service agreements, statements of works and other complex sales or purchase agreements can also benefit from AI. It leverages the full company playbook and clause library to guide the contract drafter and reviewer along the negotiation at agreement pass.

4. Third-Party Contract Risk Review

AI assesses the risk of contracts during the pre-signature review phase by reviewing third-party paper against corporate standards and checklists. It then summarizes the risks, flags key issues using contract review templates and unique company clauses and suggests proper edits.

5. Playbook Management

Combined with a user-friendly AI platform, AI-driven contract review allows legal teams to manage, collaborate and use AI to apply corporate playbooks and precedents automatically. Legal professionals can then use the real-time data and insight provided by the platform to improve playbook standards and understand enforcement across the business.

Conclusion

Businesses want as many agreements on their contract terms and paper as possible. When a contract is on “other party paper,” it is difficult to adhere to a company’s playbook and enforce guidelines. Ultimately, it slows down contract execution. However, by relying on AI, corporate legal departments are aptly equipped to pave a rapid path to contract closure and signature and accelerate business while increasing contract compliance.

To learn more about AI and tools for contract management, read a recent study that details how AI and contract review increases corporate legal productivity by more than 50%.

Starting employment with a new company is often one of the most exciting moments in one’s career, but it’s not something that should be rushed into. One of the most important parts of this process is a careful contract review of the employment agreement, so you know where you stand from a legal perspective before any employment offer is agreed to.

A well-drafted employment agreement contract will clearly spell out the expectations of the company for the employee, and what the company owes the prospective employee to minimize any future disagreements.

Here are the top 8 things to look for when redlining an employment contract, particularly for the hiring of high-level executive or specialist positions:

1. Compensation: A base salary is one part of the total compensation package. You also need to know if and when base salary increases occur, if bonuses are available and if there is a signing bonus. You’ll also want it to be clear in your contract review if your base salary can be reduced, and under what circumstances this can happen.
2. Scope of Employment: In addition to the employee’s title and responsibilities, a good employment contract template should cover to what extent an employee’s responsibilities will expand or contract. For example including clearly defined terms for promotion, demotion and even potential relocation. For C-level executive hires, it should also outline if a seat on the Board of Directors is guaranteed or even allowed.
3. Benefits: The amount of the benefits programs, and to what extent an employee can participate in them, should be clearly and definitively outlined in any employment contract template. This includes health and disability benefits, life insurance, 401(k) and stock options, vision and dental. This section of the employment contract should also outline vacation and sick leave policies, including how much can be accrued in a year or carried over. Lastly, the contract template should clearly define if any benefits are taxable to the employee, and if the employee can be reimbursed for the tax.
4. Restraints: Look out for any restraints or limitations on your ability to engage in activities outside of the job.  These can be agreements to not compete, not solicit staff and clients or engage in other commitments either during or after the employment. Particularly look out for restraints of trades that limit what work you can do after the termination of your employment.  You don’t want to unduly impact your ability to earn a living or find another job after this one.
5. Intellectual Property: Intellectual Property (IP) such as trade secrets, marketing strategies and business systems can be extremely valuable. Standard employment contracts usually include clauses saying any IP an employee develops during their employment is owned by the company, including whether it was created on the job, in the office, or outside their normal work hours using the company’s resources or information.
6. Confidentiality: Employees are often trusted with access to different kinds of commercially sensitive information. Under an employment relationship, there is usually an implied relationship of trust and confidence. However, it is always best practice to clarify the obligations of an employee using a confidentiality agreement, also known as an NDA agreement, in relation to accessing, using, protecting, and disclosing the commercially sensitive information of the Business.
7. Term, Termination and Post-employment Agreements: The employment contract needs to clearly define if the employment is for a contracted term of time or if it is “at will” employment. It also needs to define the grounds on which an employee can be fired (due to job performance, for example) or terminated “for cause,” such as for a felony conviction or breach of the employee agreement. The contract should also specify any severance packages (including so-called “Golden Parachutes”) and the conditions on which they can be given following employment.
8. Dispute Resolution: Most employee agreements have clauses to deal with disputes between the employee and company, such as if binding arbitration is the exclusive way to deal with disputes, and what the applicable laws are to oversee such disputes.

Carefully reviewing your employment agreement before sending or signing can avoid misunderstandings that can cause disagreements or even legal action between the company and employee. Oftentimes, an experienced employment law expert will be consulted on high-profile contract negotiations. However, a great way to understand your rights and obligations is to supplement a human lawyer’s expertise with legal technology.

ReviewAI automates standard contract checks with legal template reviews, including employment agreements, saving you a significant amount of time during the contract management process. Each month we release new contract template reviews and skillsets built by subject matter experts that are specific to different industries and contract types (including employment agreements), ensuring a smooth contract review process and better employer-employee relations.

To learn more about contract automation and ReviewAI, visit here.