Contract review triage for a six-partner firm
Fenwick Barr reviewed every supplier contract from scratch. A triage agent now flags clauses against their own precedent bank before a solicitor opens the file.
Senior time spent finding the clauses, not judging them
Fenwick Barr handled around 60 supplier contracts a month for mid-market clients. Partners read each one end to end to locate the handful of clauses that mattered. The reading was unavoidable; the searching was not.
A precedent bank the firm already owned
We indexed eleven years of marked-up contracts and the firm internal clause guidance. The agent compares an incoming contract against that bank and flags deviations by category: liability, indemnity, termination, payment terms, data processing. Every flag links to the precedent that raised it and the last three times the firm accepted or rejected similar wording.
It flags, it does not advise
The agent never produces client-facing text or a recommendation. Output is a marked-up copy with reasons, which a solicitor reads before touching the contract. That boundary was set by the partners in week one and is enforced in the interface, not the prompt.
First pass down from four hours to eighty minutes
Partners now open a contract already annotated. Review quality was audited over the first fifty contracts: no material clause was missed that a manual pass had caught, and the agent surfaced three the manual sample had not.
It does not tell me what to think. It tells me where to look, which is the part that was eating the day.
FBSenior Partner, Fenwick Barr