Streamline contract reviews and ensure regulatory compliance with AI-powered playbook comparisons
Highlights
- CoCounsel's playbook comparison tool analyses documents against a firm's 'gold standard' or custom rules to identify deviations, assess issue severity, and suggest revised language, ensuring precision and compliance for contracts and internal policies.
- This capability streamlines legal review by providing point-by-point guidance, helping junior lawyers efficiently determine which revisions in a marked-up contract require escalation and creating a more efficient workflow for the team.
- Users can create custom playbooks not just from preferred clauses but also from statutory or regulatory requirements, allowing the AI to check for compliance; these playbooks are easily created and can be shared as a centralised, standard resource across the firm.
One useful capability of CoCounsel for lawyers is that it can compare a document with a playbook. It identifies where the document’s provisions comply with or deviate from playbook requirements, ensuring precision and compliance. The tool can assess the severity of an issue, outline potential legal responses, and suggest revised or mandatory clause language in place of any problematic drafting.
Accessible within CoCounsel Drafting, this capability can be a useful steer for any junior lawyer, for example, faced with a marked-up contract from their opposite solicitor and unsure about how to address specific revisions. Are they acceptable to the client or not? Do they need to be escalated, and does the revision need to be flagged to another team member or with the client directly? Point-by-point guidance by the legal team can help to focus internal inquiries on significant revisions. This ensures important issues are efficiently escalated up the chain, making a more streamlined and efficient system.
Lawyers regularly use the playbook-comparison tool in CoCounsel to identify issues with contracts and lease amendments during transactional negotiations. And this same AI process can be used to identify issues in a client’s internal policies and other documents. For example, a lawyer can use their gold standard data protection policy, which they know reflects the most recent statutory and regulatory requirements, as the first point of comparison with any client equivalent.
In certain circumstances, an AI tool can assess a document against statutory or regulatory requirements, rather than only against a client’s preferences or contractual “redlines”. Section 1 of the Employment Rights Act 1996, for example, lists some of the constituent criteria of valid employment contracts. By entering these into CoCounsel Drafting’s custom playbooks function, any missing elements in an employment contract can easily be identified.
At a glance, lawyers can determine if the document specifies key details such as the employee’s place of work, their salary, or any references to relevant collective agreements. This helps them answer whether a contract complies with specific statutory requirements, and in effect checks compliance. While a detailed review is necessary, this output offers a useful initial assessment to guide and accelerate the review. A similar approach can be applied to other statutory or regulatory requirements, where these are prescriptive.
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Optimize your legal drafting ↗Creating this kind of playbook within CoCounsel is simple. Users just input relevant gold standard clauses or sections of the contract or policy or upload the entire document. The tool will then engineer the playbook for them. This playbook can be shared across the firm, providing a centralised and standardised internal resource.
Learn how you can create stronger legal documents with CoCounsel Drafting today.
