CASE STUDY · LEGALTECH AI
LegalTech AI: faster contract review, human legal judgment.
Illustrative scenario · Sector: Legal, corporate legal and professional services · Solution partner: Brandsmashers Tech
- 750 hrsModeled first-pass review capacity released a year
- 90 → 45 minModeled first-pass review time per contract
01 · PROJECT OVERVIEW
Less searching, more judgement.
Contract review can consume significant legal-team capacity. Professionals need to find obligations, renewal and termination terms, liability and confidentiality provisions, non-standard language, commercial risks and missing clauses.
The challenge grows when an organisation handles hundreds or thousands of contracts a year.
- Secure ingestion of contracts and related documents
- Clause identification, obligation extraction and risk flagging
- Summaries and comparison against approved templates
- A review workflow where lawyers approve or reject every finding
- 1Obligations, renewal terms and termination clauses.
- 2Liability, confidentiality and non-standard language.
- 3Commercial risks and missing clauses.
02 · THE CHALLENGE
Contract volume outruns review capacity.
An in-house legal team reviews 1,000 commercial contracts a year. If first-pass review takes about 90 minutes per contract, that is 1,500 hours a year spent largely on finding and reading clauses.
- PROBLEM 01Finding the clauses
Much of first-pass review is locating obligations, dates and provisions in long documents.
- PROBLEM 02Checking against standards
Each contract has to be compared with approved templates to spot non-standard language.
- PROBLEM 03Tracking obligations
Renewals, deadlines and dependencies are easy to miss once a contract is signed.
- PROBLEM 04Judgement can’t be automated
Interpretation and decisions must stay with qualified legal professionals.
Let AI find the clauses. Let legal professionals make the decisions.
03 · THE APPROACH
AI finds and flags; lawyers interpret and decide.
A human-in-the-loop model. AI finds, extracts, summarises and flags. Legal professionals review, interpret, decide and approve. That distinction is critical.
- 01Document ingestion
Contracts and related documents processed securely.
- 02Clause identification
Important clauses and obligations identified.
- 03Risk flagging
Language that differs from predefined standards highlighted.
- 04Summarisation
Structured summaries generated for legal review.
- 05Contract comparison
Clauses compared against approved templates.
- 06Obligation extraction
Dates, obligations, renewals and dependencies captured.
- 07Human review
Legal professionals approve or reject every AI finding.
- 1→Ingest
- 2→Find
- 3→Extract
- 4→Summarise
- 5→Flag
- 6→Lawyer reviews
- 7Approved
04 · RESULTS
The modeled capacity.
An AI-assisted workflow that halves first-pass analysis would release about 750 hours a year for negotiation, risk analysis and strategic advice.
| MEASURE | TODAY | AI-ASSISTED |
|---|---|---|
| Contracts a year | 1,000 | 1,000 |
| First-pass time per contract | ~90 minutes | ~45 minutes |
| First-pass hours a year | 1,500 hours | 750 hours |
The contract volumes and time savings are illustrative, not a Brandsmashers client outcome. Thomson Reuters’ 2025 research provides the external context.
- 1,000Commercial contracts a yearIn the modeled legal team.
- 1,500 hrsFirst-pass review today1,000 × 90 minutes.
- 750 hrsAI-assisted first pass1,000 × 45 minutes.
- 750 hrsModeled capacity releasedEach year, for higher-value legal work.
- Faster first pass
Clauses and obligations are found and summarised for review.
- Consistent risk flags
Every contract is checked against the same templates.
- Obligations tracked
Renewals and deadlines are captured, not buried.
- Time for judgement
More time for negotiation, risk analysis and strategic advice.
05 · DELIVERABLES
How Brandsmashers would build it.
- Secure document processingIngestion and storage designed for confidential contracts.
- Clause and obligation extractionAI that finds clauses, dates, obligations and renewals.
- Risk flagging and comparisonChecks against approved templates and predefined standards.
- Review workflowAn interface for lawyers to approve, reject and annotate findings.
- IntegrationsConnections to contract repositories and business systems.
- AI
- LLMsClause extractionSummarisationRAG
- Documents
- Secure ingestionOCRTemplate comparison
- Application
- Review workflowsDashboards
- Platform
- IntegrationsAccess controlAudit trails
TAKEAWAYS
Why Brandsmashers.
- 01Automate finding and extracting, not deciding.
- 02Compare every contract against approved templates.
- 03Keep lawyers as the approvers of every finding.
- 04Measure first-pass time before and after.
- Corporate legal
- Law firms
- Procurement
- Professional services
- Real estate
YOUR TURN
Building contract review with AI?
LegalTech needs secure document processing, AI engineering, application development, integration and workflow design. Brandsmashers provides engineering teams to build or extend these capabilities.