AI for Contract Review

Contract review is reading a contract before you sign it and working out what you have actually agreed to. In UK construction that almost never means reading a standard form. It means reading a standard form plus a schedule of amendments, and the amendments are where the risk lives. NEC4 and JCT are reasonably balanced documents as published. What arrives from an employer's solicitor is those documents with the balance moved, and the job is finding out how far. The prompts here cover clause summarising, comparing terms across forms, flagging amendments against the standard, and drafting the correspondence that follows. THE THING THAT MATTERS MOST AI has read the published standard forms. It has never read your Z clauses. That single fact governs everything on this page. Ask about NEC4 clause 60.1 and you will get a decent general answer about compensation events. Ask whether you can recover for the ground conditions on your job and the honest answer depends on Z clause 14, which nobody has told the AI about, and which may well have deleted the very thing it just described. So the workflow that works is: give the AI the actual text. Paste the clause, paste the amendment, ask what it means and how it differs from the standard. That is a reading comprehension task and AI is good at it. Asking from memory is where it invents. WHAT IT IS GENUINELY GOOD AT Comparing an amendment against the standard. Paste both and ask what changed and who it favours. This is the highest-value use and it is fast. Plain English translation. Turning a dense clause into something you can put in front of a site manager or a director who is not going to read 400 pages. Building a risk register from a schedule of amendments. Ask it to list every amendment, summarise the effect, and flag which shift risk onto the contractor. You get a working document in minutes that would take an afternoon. Consistency checking. Does the payment schedule match the payment clause. Does the definition used in clause 12 match the one in the appendix. Cross-referencing is tedious and it is where drafting errors hide. Spotting what is missing. Ask what a standard NEC4 Option A contains that this document does not. Deletions are harder to notice than additions and often more significant. WHAT IT CANNOT DO Tell you whether a term is enforceable. That is legal advice and it needs a solicitor. Know your commercial context. Whether an onerous clause is acceptable depends on the margin, the relationship and your appetite this quarter. AI has no view worth having on that. Be relied on for clause numbers from memory. It will produce a number in the right format that is wrong. Every reference gets checked against the document. Catch everything. It is a second pair of eyes, not a substitute for a first pair. A NOTE ON CONFIDENTIALITY Draft contracts are confidential and frequently subject to an NDA. Before pasting one into an AI tool, check the confidentiality terms, your firm's policy, and whether the tool trains on inputs. Use a business tier with training disabled. If solicitors are involved, ask them first, since privilege considerations may apply to how the review is conducted and recorded. THE AMENDMENTS THAT DESERVE ATTENTION Not exhaustive, and not a substitute for advice, but these are the ones that come up: Payment terms extended, or a payment mechanism amended in ways that sit awkwardly with the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 as amended. The Act sets requirements about payment and adjudication that cannot simply be contracted out of, and where a contract falls short the Scheme for Construction Contracts can apply instead. Worth knowing, and worth advice. Time bars tightened. NEC4 already has an eight-week bar at clause 61.3. Amendments that shorten notice periods further, or add bars where the standard has none, deserve close reading because they are entitlement-killers. Fitness for purpose obligations. A standard reasonable skill and care obligation is usually insured. A fitness for purpose obligation frequently is not, which means an amendment can create a liability your professional indemnity policy does not cover. Check with your broker rather than assuming. Design responsibility shifted, particularly where design is novated and the amendments quietly make you responsible for what the novated team did before you arrived. Liquidated damages raised, or caps on liability removed. Unamended standard forms are worth reading properly once. Amended ones are worth reading properly every time, because no two schedules of amendments are the same. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS Can AI replace a solicitor for contract review? No, and the distinction is worth being precise about. AI can help you understand what a document says. It cannot advise you on what it means for you, whether a term is enforceable, or what to do about it. Those are legal services and there is a real difference between comprehension and advice. Use AI to arrive at your solicitor's door already understanding the document, with specific questions. That makes the legal spend go further, which is the genuine commercial benefit. Will AI know our bespoke amendments? Only if you show it. This is the single most important point about using AI on contracts. It has been trained on the published standard forms and knows nothing about your Z clauses, your schedule of amendments or your particular conditions. Paste the actual text in. An answer about NEC4 given from memory may describe a clause your contract deleted. Which contract forms does it handle best? The widely published ones, so JCT and NEC4 are reasonably well understood, FIDIC decently, and more specialised or regional forms less reliably. But this ranking matters less than it sounds, because you should be pasting the text in regardless. A tool working from the document in front of it performs consistently across forms. A tool working from memory is unreliable on all of them. Is it safe to upload a draft contract? Check three things first: the confidentiality terms in the document or the NDA around it, your firm's policy, and the tool's data handling including whether it trains on inputs. Business and enterprise tiers generally do not train on your data and consumer tiers often do by default. Where solicitors are instructed, ask them before uploading anything, because privilege can be affected by how documents are handled. What should I look at first in an amended contract? Payment, time bars and liability, in that order. Payment because cashflow kills more contractors than bad building. Time bars because they silently destroy entitlement you would otherwise have. Liability because caps, indemnities and fitness for purpose obligations are where an amendment can create exposure your insurance does not cover. After those, read the deletions. What has been taken out of a standard form tells you as much as what has been added, and it is much easier to miss.