Sarah is a VP of Engineering at a 200-person SaaS company. She manages three teams, owns the technical roadmap, and fields five or so contract review requests each month. It’s more or less the same each time, a CTA with a security exhibit attached, “We need you to review the Technical Security Addendum before we sign.”
Sarah opens the Word document, scrolls past the pages of commercial terms and finds the security exhibit. Annual penetration tests are fine. Customer audit rights with 30 days notice are fine. Unrestricted audit access with 48-hour notice is not fine. She’s stated all of these positions before, many times, in Slack. She gets a thank you from legal and the Account Executive, the deal moves forward, and then a week later she’s doing it again.
Sarah isn’t her real name, but this and 100 other examples are very real scenarios. I talk to CEOs, CTOs, revenue operations, and finance leaders every day who are living it.
The first wave of AI contract review software to arrive on the market was still built on the same tired, old assumption: one person, the lawyer, is doing the work. But a faster lawyer, even if they are enabled by a Word plugin or an AI copilot for legal, fails to solve for the team of people involved in contract review. Single-player software can’t fix a multi-player problem.
A contract is an interface between companies and systems.
Payment terms touch billing. The support SLA touches customer success. Insurance requirements touch legal. IP assignment touches engineering. A standard B2B deal runs through six departments before it closes. The lawyer is not the person with all the answers, so they end up being an overworked and very expensive project manager routing questions to the people who have the answers, then chasing them down, consolidating responses, and translating them back into contract language.
Think about what we actually ask the head of finance, the head of security, the CTO to do. We send them a 15-page document and say: most of this doesn’t apply to you, but there’s a question in here for you, somewhere on page 13. Answer it. Leave a comment in the word doc. Edit the text to be something we can comply with. Don’t forget to track changes. And then email me back the doc and we’ll consolidate everyone’s answers and get it into a new draft to send to the other side.
I spoke with a business operations leader recently who described his team’s process: “If we get 10 questions, it’s likely we’ll have to ping three different people internally–IT, HR, security, and someone in product.” On a particularly gnarly recent contract, he set up a Notion document so the team could workshop issues outside the Word doc. Whew!
A CEO recently described how this impacts his ability to forecast: “100% of the risk in our sales pipeline and forecast is how quickly we get through this stuff.” He had a six figure deal that slipped a full quarter due to slow contract review.
The cost of slow contract review shows up in time wasted on your team, legal fees, forecast unreliability, and most crucially, slower revenue growth. There is a better way.
Contract review is a team sport. It requires multi-player tools.
We probably always should have been running contract review in a more multi-player way, but the tools weren’t great. So we sent Word documents back and forth and pinged people with Slack reminders. We endured. I’m here to tell you, you don’t have to keep enduring!
With AI, a multi-player approach to contract review is possible. We don’t need AI to make a better single-player experience. It’s time to rethink the painful contract review process from the ground up.
An AI agent that knows your past positions can resolve without any humans at all. No need to ask the VP of Engineering to once again approve a stance on customer audits that they have already approved. When presented with a brand new redline, AI is quite capable of routing the right clause to the right person. The data retention questions go to the CTO. The payment terms go to finance. The security questionnaire goes to the CISO. No lawyer triaging in between.
Tell an AI agent once about your position on governing law clause, and in the future, it will redline without human intervention. AI can spot patterns in the feedback from your team, and keep your team from spending time on the same issues again and again. When a contract comes up for renewal and someone asks why you agreed to that data retention clause two years ago, AI can maintain a paper trail.
AI contract review software won’t replace lawyers. It can replace a single-player process with a process that works for everyone on the contract review team.
Gerri is built on that premise. Every feature we’ve shipped — smart routing, playbooks, proactive recommendations, counterproposal generation — is designed for the team, not only the lawyer. Contract review is a multi-player process, and the future of AI contract review will be multi-player.