The most common question I get on a Gerri demo: “How do I set up my first playbook?”
When founders describe the contract review problem, it usually sounds like this: They’re the choke point. The knowledge lives in their own brain so they can’t delegate it, and they remain on the hamster wheel of reviewing the same terms again and again.
Contract review playbooks change this.
With playbooks in Gerri, you set the guardrails around what positions you will and won’t accept. You can build in the checks to catch the things you want to watch out for, like a termination for convenience clause. You can make sure that what burned you once won’t burn you again.
Ok, now you just have to find the time in your day to build this playbook.
Broadly, there are two approaches: do this yourself or work with our team to do it for you. I will explain both approaches in this article.
Self-serve approaches to building your first contract review playbook
Add the things that have burned you before
Time: 20 minutes
One of the best starting points is to simply document a few things that have burned you before. We all have them. The termination for convenience clause you missed, the retroactive requirement that added too much burden, the issue that didn’t surface until a deal was already signed.
You don’t have to write the rules from scratch. Use the AI chat inside Gerri to describe what you’re trying to catch, and Gerri will draft the rule for you. Approve with one click, or refine in chat until it’s right.
You can stop here! This is your first playbook, so it doesn’t have to cover every possible scenario. Or, if you want, keep refining your playbook by laying on the following options.
Review terms in the sample playbook
Time: 45 minutes
When you sign up for Gerri, a sample playbook lands in your account automatically. It includes 20+ rules based on what comes up repeatedly in SaaS negotiations:
- Security incident notification timelines: how fast you’re required to notify customers if something goes wrong
- Logo rights: whether you can include your customer’s name and logo among your featured customers
- Jurisdiction: if there’s a dispute, where will it go to court or arbitration
- Auto-renewal terms: what happens by default at the end of the contract term
- AI and machine learning data use: if AI is part of the product and how data is handled for training purposes
Work through these, customize them to match your preferences and policies, and delete any that don’t apply.
Again, you can stop here! You’ve got a great contract review playbook in place. But if you want to do some polishing and see how your playbook performs, then you can take some time to iterate on a real contract.
Iterate on one real contract
Time: 1 hour
Upload a contract you’ve already received and run it against your playbook. See what Gerri flagged and what it missed. Anything you’d want to catch in the future, have Gerri draft a new rule for you based on the redline with one click.
Re-running the same contract doesn’t count against your billing, so iterate as many times as you need. Three to five review cycles on one contract gets you to a substantially stronger playbook. And, to be clear, you don’t need to target perfection — a playbook that covers 70% of what you see is enough to start getting real value.
Custom onboarding approach to help you build your first contract review playbook
If you want assistance getting started, we are also happy to help and simply build your first playbook for you. Here are some options to kick off that approach:
- Start with your old contracts: Share your historical signed contracts with us. We’ll extract the terms and generate a playbook that would have gotten you to those end result contracts. .
- Start with any documentation of your positions: If you have a playbook in any form (Google Doc, spreadsheet, Notion, etc), we can transform it and then import it to Gerri.
- Work with an attorney. If you have been working with external counsel on contract review, they probably have a solid understanding of your positions on key terms. Ask them to take an hour to document these. Alternatively, we can connect you with an attorney who is already familiar with Gerri and has built playbooks for our other users.
- Have a conversation with us: For CEOs and founders in particular, the playbook usually just exists in your brain. In these cases, we set up a call with a member of our team to discuss your preferred positions on key terms. We use that to build your first playbook.
What if my playbook isn’t perfect?
It doesn’t need to be. The most common concern: “What if I set it up wrong, or upload something imperfect — will that cause problems downstream?” It won’t. You can update or remove rules at any time. Start with what you have and improve it as you go. That’s the whole magic of Gerri!
Setting up your contract review playbook with Gerri
Your first playbook takes anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. You can do it yourself or lean on us to help you. We want to make you successful!
The sooner you start, the faster you remove yourself from the contract review loop.