If you’ve ever stared at a contract labeled “FINAL_v8_EDITED_USE_THIS_ONE”, you already know: contract review is one of the gnarliest legal processes out there.
It's repetitive, confusing, painfully manual, and weirdly hard to fix. But with the right workflow automation tools, it doesn't have to be.
Legal gets pulled into the process late—or worse, repeatedly—to review contracts that have already gone through multiple unofficial edits. Tracking who changed what (and why) becomes a version control nightmare.
Some contracts go through five rounds of legal. Others get signed without anyone looking at them. There's no standard routing, no shared playbook, and no clear criteria for what actually needs review.
Legal, finance, procurement, risk, compliance, IT—everyone wants to weigh in. But with no automation, approvals become a slow-motion relay race where no one knows who’s holding the baton.
Redlines fly back and forth in Word docs via email threads titled "RE: FWD: Updated version (I think?)" and no one’s sure which version is the real one.
Because the process isn’t standardised, contracts show up in legal’s inbox at the eleventh hour. Suddenly, everything’s urgent—and delays are blamed on legal.
Enter platforms like Autologyx. Here’s how automation can un-gnarl the contract review process:
Use smart forms to collect contracts based on type (e.g. NDA, MSA, SOW), urgency, and risk level. Automatically triage what needs legal review and what can be self-service.
Automate the use of approved language and fallback positions. Reduce back-and-forth by letting business users generate first drafts from templates that already meet legal standards.
Set up rules that automatically route contracts to the right stakeholders. Legal only gets involved when they need to—based on contract type, value, jurisdiction, or risk.
Stop the email ping-pong. Use centralised collaboration tools with live document tracking, commenting, and audit trails. Everyone works in the same version, at the same time.
Dashboards show where every contract is in the process, who’s responsible, and what’s holding things up. Legal stops being the mystery black box.
With automated contract workflows, you can: