5 ways AI can cut contract turnaround time

In today's fast-paced business world, speed is paramount. Every delay can mean missed opportunities, prolonged revenue cycles or stalled strategic initiatives. One area where businesses often experience significant bottlenecks is contract turnaround time. The journey from initial draft to fully executed agreement can be painstakingly slow, but it doesn't have to be.

The Traditional Bottleneck: A Relic of the Past

Historically, the contracting process was synonymous with delay. Law firms often take days, if not weeks, to send over a first draft. Often, these drafts were incredibly verbose-dense with legalese, intricate clauses, and an abundance of "whereas" and "hereinafter" and it became a daunting task to review the same. This inherent complexity meant that every subsequent party involved, from internal stakeholders to counter-parties, took significantly longer to digest, scrutinize, and redline, extending the turnaround time into an exasperating eternity. This traditional approach didn't just consume time; it consumed resources, introduced errors, and became a source of significant frustration.

The Game-Changer: AI-Powered Contract Management

However, today's landscape is dramatically different. AI and machine learning have emerged as powerful allies, revolutionizing how contracts are drafted, negotiated, and managed. Companies can now leverage tools like Lexapar, which harness these sophisticated elements to cut through the complexity and achieve unprecedented speed and efficiency.

Here are 5 key ways AI helps you reduce your contract turnaround time:

Standardize and Automate Clause Libraries

One of the biggest time sinks in traditional contract drafting is the manual search, copy, and paste of standard clauses. Lawyers spend hours ensuring consistency across documents and generating first drafts. 

The AI Advantage:
AI-powered contract management systems allow you to create and maintain a centralized library of pre-approved, legally compliant clauses and templates. Instead of starting from scratch, legal teams can select from these standardized options. Furthermore, AI can intelligently suggest appropriate clauses based on the contract type and specific deal terms, ensuring consistency and compliance which drastically cuts down drafting time. This eliminates human error and ensures that your agreements always reflect your latest legal positions.

Further, by feeding an AI system key deal parameters (e.g., party names, effective dates, scope of work, payment terms), it can instantly assemble a full contract draft using your approved templates and clauses. These tools can even adapt language based on jurisdiction or specific industry regulations. 

Lexapar’s contract playbook feature is one such tool that helps build templates and playbooks from your existing data sets for faster, consistent, accurate contracting to automate your workflow.

AI-Powered Risk Detection

The review and negotiation phase is often where contracts linger the longest. Manual review is prone to oversight, and tracking changes across multiple versions can be a nightmare.

The AI Advantage:
AI contract analysis tools can quickly identify critical provisions, potential risks (e.g., unfavorable indemnity clauses, missing key terms), and deviations from your standard playbook in incoming drafts. They can highlight ambiguities, suggest alternative language, and even perform a comprehensive risk assessment in seconds. This empowers your legal and business teams to review contracts faster, negotiate more effectively with data-backed insights, and zero in on contentious points, significantly shortening the negotiation cycle.

How Lexapar aids in identifying risks has been detailed in a separate blog as well. Read More

Gain Data-Driven Insights for Continuous Improvement

You can't improve what you don't measure. Without insights into your contracting process, identifying bottlenecks is largely guesswork.

The AI Advantage:
AI and machine learning can analyze vast amounts of contract data to uncover trends and inefficiencies. They can identify common sticking points in negotiations, flag frequently redlined clauses, or pinpoint stages in the workflow where delays consistently occur. This analytical capability allows businesses to make data-backed decisions to optimize their processes, refine their standard clauses and drafts, and proactively address systemic issues that contribute to slow turnaround times, leading to continuous improvement in contract velocity.

Smart Draft Comparison

The review and negotiation phase, often protracted due to manual comparisons and version control headaches, becomes dramatically more efficient with AI comparison features. 

The AI Advantage: 

Advanced AI capability automatically identifies and highlights every discrepancy between an incoming draft and the previous versions. Many times, it goes beyond simple redlining by intelligently categorizing changes, flagging potential risks, and even suggesting pre-approved resolutions or alternative language based on your defined negotiation parameters. This drastically accelerates negotiation speed and improves accuracy, as resources can instantly focus on critical deviations rather than manually sifting through pages. By automating the arduous process of comparing documents, a compare feature saves countless review hours, allowing teams to finalize agreements faster and with greater confidence.

Integrated AI Assistance

Instant summaries condense lengthy legal documents into digestible overviews, allowing stakeholders to grasp key terms and implications within moments, significantly cutting down on review time for even the most complex agreements. 

The AI Advantage

AI tool’s Q&A feature lets you ask about any clause, obligation, or timeline and get precise answers instantly, like having an on-demand expert, eliminating hours of manual digging. For sensitive docs, it auto-detects and blacks out confidential info ensuring GDPR/CCPA compliance without human slip-ups. Email integration pulls AI insights right into your inbox, speeding team reviews. Together, these automated summarisation, searches, and security, slashes contract review timelines from days to hours.

Why Lexapar?

Lexapar stands out as it provides all the above mentioned tools and helps companies reduce contract turnaround time by automating risk detection, drafting, and reviews, all whilst minimizing errors. It strives to provide cutting-edge service by blending advanced AI intelligent playbooks and email integration with on-demand experts for superior speed and precision.