A corporate legal operations team was reviewing roughly 400 vendor contracts a month by hand, creating a persistent backlog that was slowing down procurement across the business.
Automating Contract Review with Human-in-the-Loop Agents
Service Provided
Capabilities Utilized
Agentic Architecture, Document Intelligence, Compliance Design
Client challenge
Junior counsel spent most of their time on first-pass review — checking for missing clauses, non-standard terms, and deviations from approved templates — work that was necessary but left little time for the substantive negotiation work that actually needed legal judgment. The backlog regularly ran two to three weeks deep.
Our solution
We built an agent that performs first-pass contract review: extracting key terms, flagging deviations from approved templates, and checking for a defined set of required and prohibited clauses. Every flagged issue includes a citation back to the specific contract language and the relevant policy it deviates from, so reviewing attorneys can verify the agent’s reasoning at a glance rather than re-reading the full document.
The agent never approves or rejects a contract itself — it produces a structured review memo that a human attorney signs off on, preserving clear accountability for every decision.
Results
First-pass review time per contract dropped from an average of 52 minutes to 9 minutes, cutting the legal team’s contract backlog from three weeks to under three days within two months of rollout. Attorney time freed up by the automation was redirected to negotiation and higher-value counsel work, and the team’s own survey showed reviewing attorneys trusted the agent’s flags enough to rely on them directly in 91% of reviews.
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