Legal
Speed up first-pass contract reviews, flag high-risk terms automatically, and keep outside legal spend down.
Updated 4 days ago · 10 sources
Proof over hype
Rate any example below — it feeds which ones stay on this page.
- EnterpriseQanooni
Inspired Thinking Group (ITG)
ITG's in-house legal team needed to review contracts faster without moving lawyers into a separate tool or asking them to accept unreviewed edits.
ITG reported a 60% reduction in contract-review time during the pilot and a 25–30% productivity improvement on comparable contract work after rollout.
The takeaway Keep the evidence and the decision with the lawyer. The faster workflow came from drafting inside Word with reviewable sources, rather than from handing contract judgment to the software.
How they did it
ITG piloted Qanooni inside Microsoft Word, then integrated it with SharePoint and OneDrive. The tool proposes tracked edits with links to the legal authority behind each suggestion; lawyers still review and approve every change.
- NewEnterpriseHarvey
Carvana
As Carvana grew, its legal team's workload grew faster than the team itself — contracts, financings and litigation kept piling up, and manual document review plus heavy reliance on outside counsel meant nearly everything moved slowly.
Each lawyer reclaimed an estimated 7 to 10 hours a week, and template-based drafting and review got 80% faster, on the vendor's account.
The takeaway This didn't stay a pilot in one team — it spread from 19 people to five departments, and 26 templates became reusable playbooks. That's the real signal a tool is working: legal teams don't need to be told to adopt it wider, they do it on their own because it's actually saving them time.
How they did it
Carvana piloted Harvey with 19 lawyers, then expanded it to more than 70 people across Legal, Government Affairs, Real Estate, Financial Reporting and Investor Relations. The team converted 26 of its own contract templates into AI-supported playbooks (a written set of the company's standard positions the AI checks new documents against) and connected Harvey directly to Microsoft Word and iManage — the systems lawyers already worked in — so first-pass drafting, redlining (marking up suggested edits directly on the document) and research happened inside their normal workflow instead of a separate tool. Automated consumer-litigation and regulatory workflows alone saved more than 800 hours in a year. "Harvey allows our lawyers to focus on higher-judgment counseling and solution design that keeps pace with Carvana's technology-driven business," said Paul Breaux, Carvana's VP, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary.
- NewMid-marketIvo
Quora
Quora wanted to keep growing without adding headcount just to review the flood of NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) and counterparty contracts that came with it — and the person available to do that review wasn't a lawyer.
Average NDA approval time fell from four business days to two, and first-pass review of lower-risk contracts dropped from about 11 hours to under 5 minutes, on the vendor's account.
The takeaway The person running this tool isn't a lawyer — that's the real story. Ivo didn't make an attorney faster, it let someone who isn't one safely handle the first pass, which freed actual legal judgment for the contracts that needed it.
How they did it
Legal operations lead Adrie Christensen — not an attorney or a paralegal — brought in Ivo to do the first pass on every NDA and third-party contract: checking it against the company's approved positions and flagging what actually needed a lawyer's judgment, inside the Microsoft Word document lawyers already worked in. "I'm helping to manage the process of reviewing NDAs, despite not being an attorney or a paralegal," Christensen said. "It's beneficial that I can utilize Ivo, which highlights the critical elements for us, and allow our team to concentrate on more intricate matters."
- NewEnterpriseLuminance
Trench Group
Trench Group's legal team, at a 12,400-person manufacturer, ran a standardized contract review process that still ate hours on every routine agreement, and sales and operations staff had to wait on legal even for the simplest ones.
Average contract review time fell from 150 minutes to 30, and business teams now handle about 80% of contracts without waiting on legal at all, on the vendor's account.
The takeaway The bigger win wasn't a faster legal team, it was a legal team that stopped being a bottleneck for routine work entirely. Sales and operations now self-serve 80% of contracts, and legal only sees the ones that actually need a lawyer.
How they did it
Luminance now does the first-pass review on incoming contracts, comparing them against Trench Group's approved positions, flagging nonstandard clauses and suggesting fallback wording the reviewer can insert with one click. The company also opened controlled access to sales and operations staff, who now handle routine agreements themselves and only escalate to legal when something falls outside the standard playbook — the company's own list of pre-approved contract positions. When a tariff-review project came up that would normally have taken two and a half weeks, the team finished it in under two hours using the same tool.
- Learn from thisSmall business
Mike Singh Sethi and William Rounds, immigration lawyers
An immigration appeal to the Ninth Circuit needed real case law behind it. What the court got instead was fiction.
A six-month suspension from practicing before the Ninth Circuit for each attorney, plus referral to the State Bar of California.
So: Put a named person on record checking every citation before filing — the exact discipline the court itself now requires of this firm, in writing, on every brief, with no end date set.
The takeaway The lawyers who signed this brief never read the cases it rested on. If nobody at your firm is required to personally verify every citation an AI tool hands them, you are one motion away from this exact story.
How they did it
The opening brief in the appeal cited two cases that do not exist, "Eduardo v. Garland" and "Lay v. Holder," and attached quotations to two real cases, Kamalthas v. INS and Avendano-Hernandez v. Lynch, that neither decision actually contains. An unlicensed writer had drafted the brief using a generative AI tool, and neither Sethi nor Rounds — the licensed attorneys who signed it — had personally read the cases before it was filed. At oral argument, the panel asked Rounds directly whether AI had produced the errors; he denied it more than once before eventually conceding it was "possible." Sethi and Rounds had earlier told the court the fake citations were typos. The Ninth Circuit's opinion draws a sharp line: it did not sanction the lawyers for using AI. It sanctioned them for letting fabricated authority reach a federal appeals court and then calling it a typo instead of owning it.
- Learn from thisEnterprise
Deloitte Australia
Australia's Department of Employment and Workplace Relations paid Deloitte roughly A$440,000 for an independent review of the IT system that decides who gets flagged and fined under the country's welfare compliance rules.
Deloitte agreed to repay part of its A$440,000 government contract — the final installment — after a researcher found the AI had invented citations and a court quote that was never written.
So: Ask every adviser in writing whether generative AI touched the report, name the tool, and name the person who checked every citation and quote against the original source before it shipped.
The takeaway This wasn't a startup cutting corners — it was Deloitte, one of the most process-heavy firms in the world. If their review didn't catch fabricated citations before publishing, yours won't either without a named human checking each one.
How they did it
Deloitte used generative AI, later confirmed to be Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service running GPT-4o, to help produce the review. University of Sydney health and welfare law researcher Chris Rudge read the published report and found the consultants had invented the references: nonexistent academic papers attributed to real researchers, a quote attributed to a Federal Court judgment that was never written, and even a misspelled name for the judge who supposedly wrote it. Once the errors became public, Deloitte published a corrected version months later, in October 2025, that added a disclosure stating generative AI had been used in producing the report — a disclosure the original version never carried. A spokesperson for the department that hired Deloitte, DEWR, told reporters afterward that "the substance" of the review's findings and recommendations remained unchanged, even while confirming the citation errors.
Try this today
Turn a contract into a dated obligations list
15 minYou see every deadline, notice period and renewal date in one table, not buried in pages.
Copy the prompt
You are a contracts analyst. Below is one agreement. Build a table with these columns: obligation, who owes it, trigger or date, section number, exact quoted wording. Cover payment terms, notice periods, renewal and termination dates, service levels, audit rights, and any reporting duty. Use only text that appears in the document. Quote the wording word for word. Do not paraphrase, and do not add anything that is not written there. If a date depends on another event, name that event. If a section is unclear, list it separately under CHECK THIS rather than guessing. Agreement: [PASTE THE FULL TEXT OF THE CONTRACT]
One check first. A first pass for a lawyer, never a citation or a legal conclusion. Check every quote yourself. Keep privileged files out of consumer chatbots.
Compare a supplier draft against your standard positions
20 minYou get a clause-by-clause gap list before the call, so you argue about the three that matter.
Copy the prompt
You are a contracts analyst. First I paste our standard position on each clause. Then I paste a supplier's draft. Work through our positions in order. For each one: name the clause, quote the supplier's exact wording, mark it BETTER, WORSE or SAME against our position, then give one sentence a non-lawyer could act on. If the draft says nothing on that point, write MISSING and move on. Do not guess at wording, do not summarise anything I have not pasted, and do not draft replacement language. End with the three worst gaps, ranked, and say why each one is worst. Our positions: [PASTE YOUR STANDARD POSITIONS] Supplier draft: [PASTE THE DRAFT]
One check first. Treat the ranking as a first pass for a lawyer, not a citation or a legal conclusion. Never paste privileged drafts into a consumer chatbot.
Rewrite a legal position in plain English
10 minYour business team understands the answer on first read, so the same question stops coming back.
Copy the prompt
You are a translator between lawyers and business teams. Below is a legal position I have already decided. Rewrite it for [ROLE, FOR EXAMPLE A SALES DIRECTOR] in under 200 words. Use these headings: What you can do. What you cannot do. What to do if a customer pushes back. Who to ask. Write the way a national newspaper writes. No Latin, no clause numbers, and no hedging words such as generally or typically. Keep my decision exactly as I wrote it. Do not soften it, widen it, or add exceptions I did not give you. If my position leaves a question open, list it at the end under OPEN. My position: [PASTE YOUR POSITION]
One check first. A first pass for a lawyer, not a citation or a legal conclusion. Your position may be privileged, so keep it off consumer chatbots.
Specialized tools, and what to ask vendors
| Tool | What it does | Setup | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Harveyenterprise | Answers legal research questions and drafts documents against your own files, with links back to the source it used. | MonthsIT sign-off | You run repeat, document-heavy work like due diligence (checking contracts and records before a deal).Skip it ifSkip it if your team is five people. Seat prices and setup only pay back across hundreds of lawyers. |
| Spellbookper seat, small team to enterprise | Handles contract redlining (marking up suggested changes) inside Microsoft Word, against the positions you normally accept. | Under a weekIT sign-off | Your team lives in Word and reviews a steady stream of routine commercial contracts.Skip it ifBespoke, high-stakes drafting where every clause gets negotiated. You will fight the suggestions. |
| Luminancemid-market to enterprise | Reads a large pile of contracts and flags the odd ones: missing clauses, unusual terms, obligations you forgot. | WeeksIT sign-off | A deal, an audit, or a new rule forces you to read thousands of old agreements.Skip it ifYou have a few hundred contracts and a decent filing system. Read them. |
| Ironcladmid-market to enterprise | Runs your contract process end to end: request, drafting, approval, signature and storage, with AI review built in. | MonthsIT sign-off | Contract volume is growing, your team is not, and the business complains about how long you take.Skip it ifYour templates are a mess. A CLM (contract lifecycle management system) will only speed up the mess. |
Questions to ask before you buy
Harvey — 7 questions to ask them
Also used by. DLA Piper, Slaughter and May
- When your tool gives me a citation, is it checked against a real case database before I see it?
- Has any court tested whether using you affects privilege (the protection that keeps lawyer-client advice confidential)?
- Where are my documents stored, do they leave my country, and what happens to them when we terminate?
- Is my client work used to train your models or anyone else's, and will you put that in the contract?
- What will year one cost all in, including setup, and what makes the price grow after that?
- Which customer is closest to my size and practice mix, and can I call them without your team listening?
- Show me a firm that ran a pilot and did not buy. What went wrong there?
Luminance — 7 questions to ask them
- What accuracy do you get on my document types, and who measured it, you or a customer?
- Where are the documents processed, and can everything stay inside my own environment?
- When the system is unsure about a clause, what does a human see, and when?
- After the review ends, is the document set deleted, and did any of it train your models?
- How do you keep privileged material separate from everything else in a review?
- What does a review my size cost end to end, and what makes the bill grow mid-project?
- Which customer ran a review my size, and what did the tool miss on that job?
Ironclad — 7 questions to ask them
Also used by. Dropbox, Rivian, Zoom
- How much template and playbook (your standard position on each clause) clean-up do we finish first?
- What does the export look like on termination: every contract, every version, every approval?
- Which AI features are generally available today, and which are still in early access?
- How does the system decide a clause is off-policy, and can my team see and change that rule?
- What is the total first-year cost including setup, and who on my team is needed full time?
- Which customer my size measured faster contract turnaround, and can I call them without you on the line?
- Which customers moved off you, and what did they say broke?
What everyone is asking
- NewJul 2026
Best AI for contract review right now?
That depends on where your team works. Spellbook and tools like it sit inside Word for routine commercial contracts. Ironclad runs the whole contract process. Luminance is for large piles of old agreements.
What to watch for
Almost every public comparison is written by a vendor. Ask two customers of each to run the same ten contracts and tell you what got missed.
Also worth a look. Spellbook, Ironclad, Luminance, Harvey
- NewJul 2026
Is it malpractice to use AI for legal research?
Courts have not banned AI research. They have punished lawyers who filed citations they never read. The heaviest orders went to the lawyers who then hid what happened.
What to watch for
Court guidance now says one thing over and over. Read the case before you cite it. Nobody gets excused because a tool wrote the brief.
Also worth a look. Check every citation in a primary source, Ban AI research outright, Require a written AI disclosure on every filing
- NewJul 2026
Does using AI waive attorney-client privilege (your right to keep legal advice confidential)?
Courts disagree so far. Some have treated AI tools as tools rather than third parties. One court found privilege waived where a client used a public tool without a lawyer directing it.
What to watch for
The rule your team can follow today: privileged material only goes into a tool you have a signed contract with.
Also worth a look. Enterprise tool under contract, no training on your data, Public consumer chatbot, No AI on privileged material at all
- NewJul 2026
Will AI actually make my legal team faster?
Drafting speeds up and checking eats some of that back. Teams that measure tool usage, rather than how long a job takes end to end, cannot answer this.
What to watch for
Lawyers are more doubtful than vendors. The usual complaint is that checking time simply replaces drafting time.
Also worth a look. Measure how long a piece of work takes end to end, Measure tool usage, Measure outside counsel spend
Worth following
Artificial Lawyer
Legal technology news site covering AI in law firms and legal departments.
daily · publication
Why them
First to report most legal AI deals, and openly sceptical when the claims get loud.
LawSites — Bob Ambrogi
Robert Ambrogi, a lawyer and journalist who has covered legal technology for two decades.
several times a week · blog
Why them
He tests products, reads the court orders, and writes plainly about what actually shipped.
Legal IT Insider
Trade publication covering legal technology buying, vendors, and law firm IT.
daily · publication
Why them
Strong on what firms actually bought, including the deals nobody announces loudly.
Legal Evolution — Bill Henderson
A law professor's education project on how the legal services market is changing.
monthly · publication
Why them
Long, careful essays. Read it when you need to think, not when you need news.
Legaltech Hub
A directory and research site listing legal technology products by what they do.
weekly · directory
Why them
Worth reading before a buying cycle, so you know who exists beyond the loudest three.
The Volokh Conspiracy
A law professor blog hosted at Reason, running since 2002.
daily · blog
Why them
It posts the AI sanctions orders fast, with the judge's actual words attached.