From Manual to Masterful: AI for Legal Teams

Legal teams are some of the most skilled professionals in an organization. Yet too often, their time is consumed by manual, repetitive contract review. For example, one company’s legal ops team relied upon spreadsheet-based playbooks for years, toggling between tabs, comparing contract language line by line to ensure compliance. It worked—but at the expense of efficiency, consistency, and higher-value priorities.

They’re not alone.

In an era when 42% of legal departments have been given cost-cutting mandates, labor-intensive processes are becoming unsustainable. And as more legal work is brought in-house, manual processes create a perfect storm of increasing workloads, limited resources, and mounting pressure to meet deadlines and maintain compliance.

That’s why Docusign CLM now includes AI-Assisted Review—a built-in feature that integrates with Microsoft Word, automates contract reviews using your existing playbooks, and adapts to your organization’s unique requirements.

The purpose of AI isn’t to replace human expertise, but to amplify it—helping legal teams move faster, maintain control, and scale reviews without compromising compliance. With AI-Assisted Review, standards are easier to enforce, even as more stakeholders participate in the process.

Why manual contract review holds legal teams back

Deloitte reports that 50% of companies face inefficient legal and compliance approval processes. 

The resulting bottlenecks can hinder a legal team's ability to manage growing workloads. What’s more, reliance on manual processes introduces the potential for human error, which can result in missed clauses, costly oversights, and compliance risks.

This is especially true as more people get involved in reviewing and negotiating contracts. A single reviewer is more likely to apply the same standards from one agreement to the next. But when there are multiple stakeholders, each working from their own reference point, the lack of standardization at scale can lead to inconsistent terms and elevated risk. Staying on top of terms and obligations becomes a game of whack-a-mole, rather than a professional and organized process. 

How AI-Assisted Review works

Docusign AI-Assisted Review is powered by Docusign Iris, our AI engine that’s built with trust at the forefront. This new AI capability streamlines and accelerates contracting by analyzing agreements against your organization’s predefined playbook requirements and proposing redlines for any terms that fall outside them.

For example, if your third-party MSA playbook doesn’t allow for automatic renewals, but the supplier’s contract that you’re reviewing includes automatic renewal language, AI-Assisted Review will flag the clause for your attention. It will also suggest edits along with a clear rationale. You can then apply the redlines and include an explanatory comment for your counterparty with a single click. This is exactly what we mean by amplifying your power. 

And, because AI-Assisted Review is available as an add-in for Microsoft Word, legal teams can review, redline, and apply playbook guidance directly within the tool they already use every day. There’s no need to switch between platforms—everything happens in one familiar, centralized workspace.

With AI-powered technology, legal teams and the entire organization reap these benefits:

• Significant time savings: Legal teams can complete contract review in minutes instead of hours

• Optimized resources: By embedding playbook standards directly into the review process, legal can empower more stakeholders to participate in reviews without sacrificing control, consistency, or speed

• More robust risk and compliance management: By leveraging AI to enforce an organization's standards across all contracts, legal teams can better manage risk and support compliance obligations even as more people get involved in the review process

Getting started with AI-Assisted Review

Here are some tips to get up and running:

• Lock in leadership support: Buy-in from company leadership is crucial for any new technology. But the key to earning it is tailoring your message to each audience. A compelling business case speaks directly to each stakeholder: Sales may care about faster deal cycles, while procurement may focus on cost reduction. Highlight the specific ways AI-Assisted Review saves time, frees up bandwidth, mitigates risk, and removes bottlenecks—based on what matters most to each team.

• Start with an impactful use case: Focus your efforts to implement AI-Assisted Review, beginning with the review of an agreement type with high immediate value. This could be a simple, high-volume NDA or a lower volume but more complex agreement like a vendor MSA. Remember, the use case may not be the one with the most volume but the one with the greatest overall organizational value. 

• Start with what you have: If you already have a contract review playbook, that’s an ideal place to begin. AI-Assisted Review can interpret those requirements with minimal effort. If you don’t have a formal playbook, look for informal guidelines, approval checklists, or team preferences used during reviews. Even your contract templates can serve as a foundation; they often reflect your organization’s standards in narrative form and can be reverse-engineered into a structured playbook.

• Leverage available resources: Docusign offers robust support to help you get up and running. The Microsoft Word add-in includes example playbooks to guide your setup. You’ll also find tutorials on Docusign University, live and recorded events in the Docusign Community, and detailed documentation in the Docusign Support Center—all designed to help you create and implement playbooks and leverage the power of AI review.

With AI-Assisted Review in place, organizations can start seeing impact quickly.

Measurable success

The Deloitte study revealed that legal leaders with more advanced agreement capabilities, like AI in review and risk evaluation, reported an average of 21% fewer agreements out of compliance with legal and business requirements.

At Docusign, we’ve experienced firsthand how much more can be done and with greater accuracy by replacing manual legal workflows with automated ones. By using Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) and CLM internally, our legal operations team has accelerated and standardized the review process, completing 95% of MSA negotiations in under five days.*

In-house legal teams at Docusign customers are also reporting significant improvements based on their use of AI-Assisted Review, including handling more seasonal work without increasing headcount and reducing contract review times significantly.

The net result: legal teams and related stakeholders are being more productive, gaining back valuable time to focus on strategic work, and reducing risk—a triple win for everyone. 

Docusign AI-Assisted Review is available today—at no additional cost—for existing CLM customers. Get started now to see how it can help you amplify your legal expertise and unlock more value from your contract workflows. Request a demo.

*Based on Docusign internal usage.