AI contract review for Australian lawyers

The 16-point checklist

Every contract is reviewed against the same list, and each item comes back as present, missing, unclear or a risk, with a one-line finding and recommendation:

• Parties, with full legal names and ABN or ACN
• Consideration, term and renewal, payment terms and invoicing
• Termination rights, for cause and for convenience, and notice periods
• Limitation of liability and indemnities
• Confidentiality, and IP ownership and licensing
• Dispute resolution, governing law and jurisdiction
• Force majeure, entire agreement and assignment restrictions
• Australian Consumer Law compliance and unfair contract terms risk in standard form contracts

The review closes with a low, medium or high risk rating and a short explanation of why.

Built around the Australian unfair contract terms regime

Two of the sixteen checks exist because of Australian law specifically: compliance with the Australian Consumer Law, and the risk that a term in a standard form contract is unfair. Those are the checks a generic, US-trained review tool is least likely to run.

What the review reads, and what it does not

The review reads the first 12,000 characters of the document, which covers most commercial agreements and letters of offer but not the schedules of a long facility agreement. For a long contract, review the operative clauses first and the schedules separately.

If the matter has its parties recorded, their names are anonymised before the text is analysed. Record the parties on the matter before you run a review on anything confidential.

Commercial templates to start from

When the answer is a new document rather than a markup, the template library includes commercial and corporate starting points:

• Non-Disclosure Agreement and Simple Services Agreement
• Joint Venture Agreement
• Shareholder Agreement, Company Constitution and Board Resolution
• Loan Agreement, Loan Facility Agreement and Guarantee Deed
• Commercial Lease Heads of Agreement and Option Deed

Questions

Further reading

• Contract review with AI: what it catches and what it misses
• How pasting a brief into a consumer chatbot can waive privilege
• The verification burden: when checking AI costs more than doing it

See every feature on the features page, how Legal Brain compares with Harvey, CoCounsel and Lexis+ on the comparison page, or how client data is handled on the security page. Also for employment law and litigation.