Agent Deployments: Legal
First-pass contract review down from an average of 72 minutes to 11
Fee-earners were spending the first part of every working day working through a queue of routine contract reviews. The documents were important, but the work was repetitive, and it was limiting the firm's capacity for the advisory work that clients valued most and that generated the strongest margins.
Agent Deployments
a commercial law firm
Snapshot
Snapshot
A commercial law firm with 18 fee-earners was receiving a steady flow of NDAs, supplier agreements, and standard commercial contracts from clients who expected a fast turnaround. The initial review of each document (reading it against the firm's standard positions, flagging deviations, and preparing a summary) was taking between 45 and 90 minutes per document. With 18 fee-earners handling reviews at that pace, the backlog was frustrating clients and pulling associates away from advisory and drafting work.
Challenge
What we were asked to solve
Fee-earners were spending the first part of every working day working through a queue of routine contract reviews. The documents were important, but the work was repetitive, and it was limiting the firm's capacity for the advisory work that clients valued most and that generated the strongest margins.
Solution
How we approached it
We built an AI-powered contract review workflow that ingests incoming documents, checks key clauses against the firm's own playbook, flags deviations with a risk rating, and produces a structured review summary ready for a fee-earner to validate and act on. A human sign-off step is retained before any output is shared with clients.
First-pass review time fell from an average of 72 minutes to 11 minutes per document. The 61 minutes saved on each document helped the team clear a backlog that had been building for weeks and gave associates more time for advisory and drafting work.
Results
The numbers
Why this one worked
Why this one worked
The firm already had its own playbook of standard positions, so the review checked key clauses against it. A fee-earner validates the summary and acts on it, and a human sign-off step is retained before any output reaches a client.
What happened next
What happened next
[[NEEDS COPY: current state or next phase, from the engagement record]]