Case Study: Contract review multi-agent platform for a corporate law firm
A multi-agent contract review platform for a US law firm focused on tech-sector M&A and commercial contracting. The system extracts clauses, scores risk against firm precedent, and proposes redlines, with attorney review at every step.
Project details:
About the Client:
The Client is a US-based mid-market law firm with 80 attorneys, focused on tech-sector M&A and commercial contracting. As deal volume grew, the firm’s contract review process – carried out by associates working from individual checklists – became inconsistent across reviewers, and a near-miss on an indemnity carve-out pushed leadership to evaluate AI-assisted review.
Location: USA
Industry: Legal services
Team size: 7 specialists (1 AI Architect, 2 ML Engineers, 1 Backend Engineer, 1 Frontend Engineer, 1 QA Engineer, 1 Business Analyst)
Project duration: 6 months
Business challenge
The Client wanted to reduce associate time spent on routine contract review and bring consistency to clause-level risk assessment without losing attorney oversight of every redline.
Additional requirements:
- Preserve attorney sign-off at every step of the workflow
- Ground risk scoring in the firm’s own contract precedent rather than generic legal norms.
Our solution
SumatoSoft delivered a multi-agent contract review platform that helps associates extract, score, and redline contract clauses against the firm’s own precedent. The platform coordinates three agents: a clause extractor, a risk scorer, and a redline drafter, with attorney review checkpoints between each stage. Output flows into the Client’s document management system as suggested redlines, never auto-applied changes.
Multi-agent architecture grounded in firm precedent
The three agents mirror the sequence associates already follow: read first, score second, draft third. Clause extraction runs through Azure OpenAI GPT-4.1, risk scoring retrieves comparable clauses from the firm’s precedent corpus indexed in Pinecone, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet drafts redlines using the firm’s preferred language patterns.
Additional features:
- Attorney-in-the-loop checkpoints between every agent step
- Audit trail capturing every agent decision and attorney action
- Clause-level redline suggestions with rationale and citations
- iManage and Active Directory integration
- Quarterly precedent-corpus refresh workflow
Business value
Before:
- Associates spent 6+ hours per NDA or MSA on manual clause-by-clause review against individual checklists.
- Clause coverage varied across reviewers, and the firm had a recent near-miss on an indemnity carve-out.
- There was no documented standard for risk assessment, so each associate relied on their own familiarity with firm precedent.
- Partners had limited visibility into how associates were applying review checklists day to day.
After:
- Associates use the platform to extract clauses in minutes and focus their hours on partner-level judgment, with average review time on covered contract types down 47%.
- Clause coverage consistency, measured against partner-validated checklists, rose from 71% to 94% across all 80 attorneys.
- Risk scoring is grounded in the firm’s own precedent corpus, with comparable clauses and historical partner positions retrieved on every contract.
- Partners inspect every agent decision and every accept, edit, and reject action by associates, with the audit trail feeding the quarterly precedent-corpus refresh.
