What is Contract Review Software?

Contract review software

Traditionally, lawyers spend countless hours reviewing hundreds of contracts every year. The contract review process has long been mired with inefficiencies and cycle times that can seriously impact team output and slow down the speed of business. Contract review software fills a critical gap in improving the efficiencies of corporate legal teams, transforming this time-consuming, manual task.

What is Contract Review Software?

Contract review software automatically reviews and marks up legal contracts according to a company’s playbook. Since the software harnesses the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it can recognize inconsistencies and patterns, providing insights to contract teams who can action them more quickly.

Some of the benefits of contract review software include:

  • Efficiency: By automating the process of reviewing contracts, lawyers are free to spend their time on higher-value and more critical tasks. Contract review software can also bypass the potential for human error resulting from inexperienced or overworked professionals.
  • Quicker review cycles: Since contract review software like BlackBoiler is trained to redline contracts just like a human, it can speed up review cycles and result in deals being closed more quickly. Traditionally, lawyers have spent longer deliberating over every point within a contract, which can slow down cycle times.
  • Organization: Any legal professional knows that organization is both an important and difficult-to-balance aspect of any attorney’s office. Contract review software not only creates actionable insights but can categorize contracts and calculate risk.

Which Contract Review Software is Best?

There are numerous contract review solutions on the market, but it’s important to note that there are distinctions to be made. Broadly speaking, there are four distinct types of contract review software, including:

  1. Human-in-the-loop
  2. Clause extraction
  3. Contract Analysis
  4. Redlining

Each of these types of contract review software has its specific purposes, and each has advantages and disadvantages.

Human-in-the-loop Software

As the name suggests, this kind of technology integrates software with human interaction. Attorney’s will still retain input into the process at a certain stage, allowing for greater insight and analysis, while still delivering process efficiencies. Equally, though, it means that lawyers have to dedicate time to the process of reviewing contracts as opposed to having a fully automated solution from end to end.

Clause Extraction Software

Clause extraction contract review software is capable of analyzing a contract and extracting key clauses. This information can then be automatically categorized for review by attorneys, who need to focus on the most critical information and common mistakes. However, the functionality doesn’t go far beyond that. This kind of contract review software cannot make edit suggestions, nor change anything else.

Contract Analysis Software

Contract analysis software uses machine learning to help companies analyze contracts more efficiently and effectively. This software utilizes machine learning algorithms, which aid the authoring of contracts as well as their outcomes. These algorithms take apart documents, checking each area of the entire contract lifecycle against other approved templates for contract language to show the user how terms and conditions differ.

Redlining Software

Redlining software is a type of technology that directly edit contracts and other documents, providing a side-by-side comparison of an original and an edited version. It’s capable of spotting human error and improving contracts in general, though its capabilities can depend largely on the quality of the solution; some are more advanced than others.

BlackBoiler: The Best Contract Review Software Powered by AI

BlackBoiler is the only patented contract software, powered by AI, to immediately analyze and amend contracts in “Track Changes,” exactly as an attorney would. The software’s proprietary learning and language processing model means that the review software. continuously learns from its own inherent feedback loop.

  1. Review: BlackBoiler can review your contracts, highlight errors, and recommend amendments in line with a contract negotiation playbook provided by you.
  • Build: Within BlackBoiler, your legal department can dictate its own legal playbook. This underpins the software’s review process, as BlackBoiler will learn from your own playbook in order to instantly review inbound contracts and amend them directly into “Track Changes.”
  • Secure: BlackBoiler has both on-prem and cloud-based secure storage.

BlackBoiler is a fully automated solution, which means there’s no need for human involvement unless you choose to facilitate it. Many competing contract review software packages focuses on basic, routine tasks, like wholesale revision, deletion, and replacement, but BlackBoiler’s unique machine learning engine allows it to work in same way that a human attorney would.

BlackBoiler comes ready to use out-of-the-box, but it’ll improve with every contract that it reviews. Leaning on your company’s defined legal playbook, the AI will learn from each document that it processes, becoming better aligned with your playbook and legal standards each and every time it is used.

Other key product features include:

  • Simple integration into existing processes: Getting a redlined version of any contract is as simple as directing an inbound contract email to your dedicated BlackBoiler email address. The whole process takes just 3 minutes.
  • A detailed data dashboard: An industry leading multidisciplinary team of attorneys, researchers, and software developers contributed to BlackBoiler’s patented Automated Contract Markup algorithm.
  • Your company’s own legal playbook: Your Smart Clause Library can be built from the ground up, using your company’s typical negotiation clauses. These are all categorized by contract domain, ensuring that all contracts are treated with consistency, irrespective of the negotiator.

Is Contract Review Software Worth It?

Contract review software is absolutely worth the investment for any legal department looking to improve efficiency and reduce risk, while also minimizing costs.

Gartner highlights how the most cost-effective legal departments make significant investments in legal technology, particularly in the areas of standardizing legal work and improving work processes. Investing in contract review technology can help you cut down on common errors and drive efficiency. Request a demo of BlackBoiler today.

BLACKBOILER CONTRACT REVIEW SOFTWARE