NLP

Clause extraction and contract review acceleration

A clause-level extraction layer that turns multi-day first-pass reviews into a structured workflow lawyers can audit.

Typical duration: 12-16 weeks to launch, then a parallel-run pilot on live matters
Team shape: 1 ML lead + 2 full-stack engineers + a legal-domain product partner from your side

What good looks like

First-pass review

From days of clause hunting to hours of clause assessment per matter

Reviewer focus

Time shifts from finding clauses to evaluating them

Audit trail

Every extraction traceable to a source span and page

The problem this addresses

Commercial law firms doing M&A and large contract reviews hit a bottleneck on first-pass clause identification, senior associates spending evenings hunting for change-of-control, assignment, and indemnity clauses across hundreds of agreements per matter. Generic legal AI vendors usually fall over because the outputs can't be tied back to specific source text, and without that the work product isn't defensible. The kind of engagement we take on is something that fits inside the firm's existing review workflow rather than replacing legal judgment.

How we'd approach it

The extraction layer operates per clause type, with each type backed by a combination of retrieval (for shortlist) and an LLM call (for extraction and classification). Every output carries a span pointer back to the exact paragraph and page in the source document. The reviewer interface shows the extraction, the source, and a confidence band, and lets the lawyer accept, edit, or reject in a single keystroke. Edits are captured as feedback. We avoid a single fine-tuned model in favour of clause-specific prompts because clause types evolve at different rates and partners want to be able to swap any one of them out without retraining the whole system. A small but real evaluation set per clause type, built with the firm's knowledge management team, is the artefact we'd be proudest of.

What we'd build

A reviewer-facing web app and an extraction service deployed in the firm's tenant, integrated with the document management system for ingest. Coverage on launch typically focuses on a defined set of clause types from the firm's standard playbook. Drafting, redlining, negotiation support, and matter-management integration are out of scope, this is a review accelerator, not a replacement for legal judgment, and the risk committee should sign off on that framing before launch.

Honest considerations

If the firm doesn't have a stable definition of each clause type, or the partners can't agree on one, this engagement turns into a knowledge-management project before it can become a software project. If the document management system can't expose clean ingest, integration will dominate the timeline. And if the goal is to remove lawyers from the loop rather than accelerate them, this isn't the right engagement; the audit trail only works because a person signs off on every extraction.

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