Consistent AI Contract Review Without a Playbook

An in-house team that reviews the same SaaS agreement fifty times a quarter should have a playbook for it. The positions are known, the fallbacks are agreed, and writing them down once pays off every time the agreement comes back.

Then there's everything else. The one-off consultancy agreement. The vendor's own MSA, nine pages long and missing an SLA. The distribution deal you see twice a year. Most legal teams have playbooks for a handful of agreements and nothing written down for the rest. The rules for those live in someone's head.

AI review is often sold as if the playbook comes first. For the long tail of agreements, it doesn't have to. This is how to get consistent first-pass reviews in Microsoft Word with SimpleAI, with no playbook and very little setup.

Start With the Rules You Always Apply

Some rules don't depend on the contract type. You check for uncapped liability whether it's an NDA or an MSA. You look for auto-renewal, governing law and survival clauses every time. These are your universal rules, and they're the foundation of a review without a playbook.

In SimpleAI's Risk Review, these live under Primary Issues. A default set is switched on, including auto-renewal, choice of law and survival obligations. Add any rule you always look for. Unlike a playbook, these rules apply across every agreement type, so you set them up once.

Then fill in two more things.

Company details. Your legal name, address, industry and primary governing law. Risk Review saves these to your profile and flags them when the counterparty's paper gets them wrong or leaves them out.

Spelling and grammar. Turn it on if you want typos flagged, off if you'd rather not raise them with a counterparty.

All of this saves to your profile, under Settings in the add-in, so you don't repeat it for every review.

Let the Market Catch What You Didn't Anticipate

Universal rules have a gap. They catch what you thought to look for. A human reviewer also notices the unexpected: a clause that doesn't belong, or a section that should be there and isn't.

Market review covers that gap. With it on, Risk Review compares the agreement against market data and flags issues outside your own rules, with a proposed fix. Treat it as a second reader.

For a deeper market check, Market Intelligence filters the Law Insider database by country, jurisdiction or industry and flags clauses that are usually present but missing from your agreement.

Tell It Who You Represent, and What's Different This Time

With the setup done, each review needs two inputs: the party you represent and any Specific Concerns you want checked this time.

On a nine-page MSA, the review takes about 30 seconds. Each issue comes back with a risk level, a written explanation, a link that jumps to the clause and a Fix button that proposes the redline.

There's no apply-all button, on purpose. Each fix is a legal decision. You may disagree with a risk rating, and you should make that call issue by issue.

Use the Output for More Than Redlines

Sometimes the point of a review isn't the markup. You need a summary for the business stakeholder, or a short list of points for the counterparty.

The copy button at the top of the results copies every issue, ranked high, medium and low, with an explanation of each. Paste it into a note for the business or ask SimpleAI to shorten it into an email to the counterparty.

Save the Questions You Keep Asking

Plenty of review work is the same question asked again and again. The prompt library saves them so the whole team asks the question the same way.

Check the Contract Against the Policy You Already Have

Many teams have their positions written down somewhere other than a playbook, often in a policy document. Attach the policy in the add-in and ask for redlines or a summary of where the agreement conflicts with it.

If the counterparty sent a PDF, convert it first. The add-in's PDF to Word conversion uses OCR and takes a few seconds.

When a Playbook Is Worth It, Don't Start From Scratch

At some point an agreement type comes up often enough that a playbook pays off. Start from the standard library or upload your own notes as the source for a new playbook.

On a team, the web app records every change to a playbook and who made it, and lets you set who can view and run, edit, or own it.

Bottom Line

Pick an agreement you review often but have never written a playbook for. Set your company details and primary issues once, turn on market review, choose the party you represent and run Risk Review.

Want to see it on your own agreements? Get a SimpleDocs demo.