Contract negotiations, marked by a tiring back-and-forth over language agreements, are often a significant pain point for legal professionals. Even before the advent of generative AI, different contract technology products sought to simplify this process. These products would typically compare a received draft from a counterparty with a company’s draft, substituting the company’s preferred language for that of the counterparty. However, this method only replaces one preference with another, distantly mirroring a game of contract Pong.
Recently, the contract lifecycle management company,
Agiloft, introduced a new AI feature aiming to not just replace language but also to identify the areas of misalignment and subsequently redline the draft to bring both versions closer together. This feature promises to significantly reduce the back-and-forth in contract negotiations.
Agiloft’s new capability works within the Contract Assistant for Microsoft Word add-in. It utilizes generative AI to understand approved clauses, review third-party contract language for misalignments, and then formulate redlines that effectively harmonize third-party contract language with the legal team’s preferred phrasing. The feature is highly targeted at the negotiators within the legal and procurement teams responsible for contract negotiations.
Andy Wishart, Agiloft’s Chief Product Officer, explains that the main goal is to expedite review cycles by reducing manual redlining steps and lowering risk. The new feature enables better alignment with the internal standards set within an organization.
In situations where there’s no standard clause, the user can describe the required changes, and the generative AI suggests redlines accordingly. For example, when a user needs to change an indemnity clause to a mutual indemnity clause, instructing the AI with “Make mutual” will yield appropriate insertions and deletions to achieve that.
It’s worth noting that the product is best used for longer clauses with substantive differences, but for short clauses requiring few minor edits, manual intervention may be more efficient.
Last year, Agiloft launched
ConvoAI, intended to enable users to have interactive discussions with their contracts by asking questions in natural language. Following that, it released
AI Trainer that provided a no-code training capability, empowering non-technical users like subject matter experts and legal professionals to train AI models. The introduction of the redlining feature is the latest addition under Agiloft’s generative AI initiatives planned for 2024.
To read more about Agiloft’s new capability, visit:
Agiloft Releases Generative AI Feature To Shortcut Contract Negotiations and Better Align Redlines.