Your counterparty's lawyer just sent back redlines in 20 minutes. They're using AI. Are you?
I walk through exactly how I'd use SimpleAI (built on LawInsider's contract database) to respond to redlines on an MSA, using 4 layers of context that turn contract review into real negotiation leverage.
This video was made in partnership with the featured vendor. The vendor provided product access and reviewed the video for factual accuracy. Editorial opinions and conclusions remain those of Legal Benchmarks.
00:00Negotiating a contract used to take forever. Why? Because you have to gather a lot of context before you can make a good judgment call. Does this deviate from our internal playbook? Have we agreed to this position before? Is it market standard? How important is this deal to the business? Today, I'm going to show you how I use AI to gather that context faster and turn it into real negotiation leverage. Hello, welcome back to another episode of the Legal Intelligence Platform Deep Dives, otherwise known as
00:31LIPs Deep Dives. My name is Anna, a lawyer that is trying to make sense of AI in the legal profession. Today, we're taking a look at SimpleDocs, a contract review and drafting platform built for in-house counsel. At its core is Simple AI, a Word add-in for AI-powered contract review, redlines, and drafting. It's also built on top of LawInsider, one of the largest commercial contract databases in the world. In the early days, the value proposition for these legal AI tools was very much about
01:02generating text at a very fast speed. So, what is emerging now in legal AI? Add something that is more important, which is called context. Now, technology has advanced to the degree where it's easier for the users to get outputs that take into consideration more relevant context. And that is what I want to explore today with Simple AI. Here I am with my good old friend Microsoft Word and my Simple AI assistant ready to go. Today, I am an in-house counsel for a
01:33supplier and I have just received these redlines on my template MSA from the counterparty legal counsel called Mary, representing Acme as the buyer. In the future, I think the following scenario would happen a lot, which is the lawyer would send out a draft template before lunch thinking maybe there's going to be a bit of peace and quiet for at least a few days before the comments come back. But then the other side is using an AI assistant to redline
02:05and review the contract. So, before you even finish lunch, the redlines would already be back in your inbox. So, I want to show you how I would use a tool like Symbol AI to respond to the draft comments and figure out what to accept, what to reject, and where to push back on. You can see on the right-hand side of Symbol AI has a very, very easy to understand user interface. There are seven core actions you can take on the home panel, and they involve redlining, drafting, comparing, review,
02:35custom playbooks, and standard playbooks, and precedent review. There's also small chatbots at the bottom that you can interact with and query, but that's it. No prompt enhancers, no complex bells and whistles. What you see is what you get. When you see redlines like this as a lawyer, you need to make a judgment call. Do you accept, reject, or mark up the markups? That decision needs to be backed by some context, and there are four pieces of context that matters here. The first one is what does my playbook say? Does this deviate from
03:07my company's preferred position? The second piece of context is have we agreed to a similar position before either with this counterparty or with similar parties externally in the past. The third piece of context is what are the market standards? Is this redline something that is very unusual or is it very common? And the last piece of context that's helpful is the commercial context. How important is this client, and how urgent and big is this deal? So, let's take a look at how Symbol AI can
03:37help me gather that context. The first thing I want to do is go to my playbooks and compare the markups against my own playbook to see whether there are any deviations from my internal policy. It's identified 25 issues for me to take a look at, and today, just because I did a quick skim, I will focus on clause 12.3, which is a liability cap to see what the Playbook analysis says about that.
04:07Because if you're a lawyer, I mean, your eyes will always go to indemnities and liability caps. Okay, so the Playbook has flagged that the counterparty's counsel, Mary, has added a carve-out to our liability cap for confidentiality and data protection breaches. This is not good news, because it deviates from my company's preferred position. So, that's the first piece of really useful context. One more thing on Playbooks, when a clause is identified as missing, Simply AI will propose a redline for you. And alongside that proposed clause,
04:39it gives you a LawInsider index score, which is essentially a similarity score, showing how closely the proposed language matches to the real contract clauses in the LawInsider database. So, you can see how it's grounded in the market. And if you really want to go deeper into it, you can just double-click on see all, and it'll take you into the LawInsider database to see the relevant clauses for yourself. If there is a deviation from the Playbook rules, yeah, I can do two things. I can either push back on this addition, or I
05:09can do a little bit of more research on whether we have ever agreed to this kind of carve-out with external parties. And this especially it'll be helpful to know whether we have agreed to such a carve-out with this company in particular, Acme. And I will do that through Simply AI's precedent review feature. And what it does is you can upload into a repository all of your previously signed agreements, and this repository will then form your precedent library for you to refer back to and
05:40analyze against. And so, today, because I am reviewing a MSA agreement draft, I will be choosing the MSA agreement type category. And ideally, I am looking for agreements that have been signed with Acme. So, I'm going to select all Acme related options here and run my search. So, you can see I have filtered for MSA signed with Acme. This took a little bit over 2 minutes to run, which is pretty fast considering that it is comparing
06:13all of the markups in this document against the full sets of 38 relevant precedents in my repository. I am focused on liability cap carve-outs in particular and I see it has identified that in the past we have never accepted any expansion to a liability cap including adding a supplier unlimited carve-out. So, as soon as I click on it, it takes me exactly to where it is in the agreement. You can click to the precedents and you can see all here the
06:44previous agreements that we've signed with Acme. It extracted an excerpt of the relevant clause, which is the limitation of liability clause. And if I don't trust this excerpt, I can further verify against the original document. And once you click on the document icon, it will pull up the PDF in the repository on the web app for you to double verify. Being able to see that we have never accepted such a carve-out before is actually the most powerful piece of negotiation evidence I can have
07:16because if you tell the counterparty, "This deviates from our internal policy," they can easily say, "Well, that sounds like your problem." And if you say, "Well, this isn't market standard," they may just come back with, "Well, it's standard for us." And you are suddenly stuck in a deadlock. But, but, but, if you can say, "Well, we signed this agreement with you before and we have never accepted this position. This carve-out was never part of a deal and we're not looking to reopen terms that were previously agreed
07:46to. That is so much harder to push back on. You're not arguing about internal preference, abstract market practice, you're pointing to exactly the history between the two parties of what was agreed to in the past. And in my experience as an in-house counsel, that is one of the hardest points to argue with. So, the third layer of context that Simple AI can also help you with is through the LawInsider's integration called LawInsider Standards. And what it does here is gives you access to market-informed playbooks. The last
08:17piece of context that is super important, but I think to date no AI assistant can help you with, is understanding the commercial context of this specific deal. How strategic is the customer? How badly does the business want this contract to be signed? And what is the timeline for closing the deal? This will all help a lawyer decide whether it's a hill worth dying on or is it a risk worth taking. So, at this point, you still need to go to the business team. Grab lunch with them, hop
08:47on a call, and understand what matters to the other side and explain also what matters to the legal side before you make a decision on how you would redline this contract and provide your comments.
Speaker change: So, learned something new then today?
Speaker change: Thank you so much.
Speaker change: Yeah, I guess you're a better negotiator than I thought you were since you're using AI, right? So, that's how I used Simple AI to boost my negotiation position as an in-house counsel for the supplier. That being said, Simple AI is currently a contract
09:19AI assistant that lives in Word. So, if you're a lawyer that wants to work on the go, maybe while you're hopping into a taxi and draft a contract via Slack or on your mobile or via web app, that is not something that Simple AI can support you with today. However, if your team is looking for something that is approachable and easy to pick up and start using inside word, then Simple AI can be a great choice. By the way, if you're shopping for the right contract review tool for your legal team, Legal Benchmarks can help. We just put
09:49together the legal industry first AI evaluation framework with accompanying toolkits that consolidate input from more than 100 legal professionals from around the world on the buy side. It's designed to support you at every stage of your vendor evaluation journey from demo to pilot. It's open access and it's free. More details are in the description. Hope you enjoy this video today and I would love to hear your experience using Simple AI. And if there are any other tools you'd like me to take a look at, let me know in the comments below. In the meantime, hope
10:20you stay curious and healthy. I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Mary, quick update on the supplier MSA. Yeah, um it's it's signed. Yeah, we closed. Oh gee, that was fast. Any pushbacks on the liability carve outs? We aligned with our historical position, so all good there. If this video piqued your interest about Simple AI and Simple Docs, check out my conversation with Preston Clark, the founder and CEO, where we talk about the competitor landscape and what it means
10:51to be transparent as a vendor in a very crowded legal AI market.
