How do you choose contract review software?

Test it on your own contracts

The single most useful thing you can do is run the tool on three contracts you already know well. Include one you consider good, one you consider bad, and one that is long and messy.

A demo on a vendor's sample document tells you very little. They chose the document. You already know what is wrong with yours, so you can check the output against your own judgement rather than being impressed by it.

If a vendor will not let you test on your own paper before you commit, that is information in itself.

Questions that separate products

Where does the comparison come from?

If the tool says a term is unusual, ask what it is being compared against, how many contracts, and from where. A tool that cannot answer is comparing against an opinion.

What happens when it is unsure?

Look for a product that distinguishes confident findings from uncertain ones. Uniform confidence across every result usually means confidence is not being measured.

Can I get from a finding to the clause in one click?

You will need to check the tool's work, and later show a colleague why you are pushing back on a term. If that takes three steps, the tool will not survive contact with a busy week.

Is my data used for training?

Get the answer in the contract, not in the sales call. If the answer is yes by default, find out how to turn it off and whether that changes the price.

Where is the document processed?

Relevant for Australian buyers with privacy obligations. If personal information is involved, this determines your position under APP 8 and your obligations if something goes wrong.

What does it do with a bad scan?

Ask to see a failure. A product that silently produces a confident but wrong answer on unreadable text is worse than one that says it could not read the page.

Judge it on the boring contracts

Vendors demonstrate on interesting documents. Most of your volume is not interesting: renewals, small subscriptions, statements of work against an existing framework.

The value of the software is mostly in that volume, because that is where careful review does not happen today. A tool that shines on a complex master agreement and adds nothing to a routine renewal is solving a problem you already had covered.

Commercial terms worth checking

You are buying a contract as well as a product. The same clauses you would check anywhere apply here.

How the price scales

Per user, per contract, or per page. Per contract pricing punishes exactly the high volume, low value review the tool is most useful for.

The renewal and its notice window

See our benchmark data on what notice windows actually look like before accepting the one you are offered.

What happens to your analyses on exit

You will have built up a record of decisions. Check you can export it, and that it is not deleted the day the subscription lapses.

Whether the trial obligates you

Some trials convert automatically. Read the conversion terms before uploading anything.

Common questions

How should I evaluate contract review software?

Test it on three of your own contracts, one good, one bad and one long and messy, rather than on the vendor's sample. Then ask where its comparisons come from, what it does when uncertain, whether you can get from a finding to the clause in one step, whether your data trains models, and where documents are processed.

What does contract review software cost?

Pricing models vary between per user, per contract and per page, and the model matters more than the headline number. Per contract pricing discourages exactly the high volume, low value reviews where these tools save the most time.

Do I need contract review software if we have a lawyer?

The two solve different problems. Software is triage: deciding which contracts and which clauses need a human. Legal review is judgement. Teams that use both typically send far less to legal, and what they do send arrives with the issues already identified.