A first-pass contract reviewer that halved partner review time and never misses a flagged clause.

As a busy full-service West Auckland firm, Smith and Partners' property, business and family lawyers field a steady flow of sale and purchase agreements, leases, shareholder agreements and trust deeds. Much of a contract review never required senior judgement at all, it was the mechanical first read, hunting for missing indemnities, vague settlement dates, one-sided warranties and clauses that quietly drifted from the firm's plain-English standards. Partners were spending hard-won billable hours on that hunt before the real advice work even began, and on a high-volume property matter the first read alone could consume the better part of a morning.

The bottleneck had real downstream effects. Turnaround for SME and developer clients slowed during settlement-heavy periods, senior review routinely pushed into evenings, and the inconsistency between how different reviewers triaged the same agreement made it harder to give clients a predictable service. The firm wanted to compress that first pass without cutting any corner on diligence, and crucially, without ever letting an automated tool sit between a lawyer and the client. Any solution had to respect privilege, keep client documents inside their own environment, and earn the trust of partners who had every reason to be sceptical of legal-tech promises.

"It hands the partner a contract that's already been read once. The missing indemnities and the soft settlement dates are flagged and ranked before we even open the file, and every flag points straight back to the clause so we can check it in seconds. We spend our time on advice now, not hunting for the gaps, and our turnaround on property matters has genuinely changed."