Ironclad Feature Review: AI Assist
#1: On its own, AI Assist is best used to review one section (or clause) at a time.
This lesson is a function of how you trigger AI Assist. Within the Edit Document modal, highlighting a section of text will cause the AI Assist button to appear. You’re then presented with redline suggestions for the clause you’ve highlighted. Highlight the entire agreement, however, and you’ll hit either slowness or an error. Highlight more than a section at a time, and the suggestions are less relevant. This means that, on its own, AI Assist won’t automatically give you a comprehensive redline review or offer suggestions. (There’s a caveat to this below.)
#2: AI Assist isn’t for a “First-Year Associate” review.
Yes, we’re talking about whether AI Assist can help you resolve nits. Ensuring that capitalized terms are defined; syntax is correct; the document has consistent list formatting; plural nouns can be changed to single nouns throughout; etcetera. Our minds immediately jumped to AI Assist being helpful here. Alas, its strong suit is supplementing legal skills, not necessarily word processing ones.
#3: Redline suggestions are based on market language.
AI Assist’s redline suggestions are a solid starting point to review clauses for which your company does not have an established playbook. By making proactive suggestions on the universe of terms a clause could have, it cues you into considerations that may not have been top of mind when you first came across the clause. If you want AI Assist to give suggestions based on your company’s unique language, well, you’re in luck because…
#4: AI Assist is strongest when it’s used in conjunction with Ironclad’s other AI features.
Ironclad has released a lot of AI features in quick succession. Though it’s possible to use certain tools on their own, the interplay between them is what unlocks their full potential.
Let’s take a look at the full suite of them…
Smart Import is a tool implicated each time you upload already executed contracts into Ironclad’s repository. It auto-detects up to 190 (and counting) AI clause properties and will capture the relevant metadata.
AI Clauses is a way for you to train Ironclad’s AI model on clauses unique to your company that are not part of the 190 (and counting) AI clauses that are automatically included.
AI Playbooks, allows you to use Ironclad’s trained AI model to assist with redlining a 3rd party template against your company’s standard clauses. In our first lesson we noted AI Assist doesn’t offer a comprehensive review if used alone. That is not the case if used in conjunction with AI Playbooks. If you’ve implemented AI Playbooks, Ironclad gives you the option to automatically apply AI Assist against all of the AI clauses that exist in your playbook. (The one gotcha is that AI Assist will not automatically review any non-AI Playbook clauses.)
With this interplay between the various AI tools, we think this is the best method for maximizing the impact AI Assist can have for your company:
Identify the key clauses your company negotiates and capture at least one standard clause and fallback clause for each.
In the relevant workflow configuration, create a playbook clause for every clause for which Ironclad has an AI equivalent. (Pro tip: Ironclad lists all the latest default AI clauses in the AI Clauses tab of your company settings.)
For every clause you did not see a default AI clause for, create a custom AI Clause. You can do this in your company’s AI Clauses tab. You’re required to paste three examples so the AI model can learn. These are clauses unique to and only usable by your company.
Back in the relevant workflow configuration, create a playbook clause for each of the custom clauses you created.
Implement the playbook and have the confidence that you’re maximizing your use of Ironclad’s AI features.
For implementing these suggestions, Ironclad provides exceptional help resources on its Help Center here. We are also happy to work with you as you think through adding Ironclad’s AI features at your company. Ironclad is rapidly delivering new capabilities, so some of the features mentioned here might be possible later on!