AI-assisted contract reviews: why the real value of AI still depends on legal expertise

For many organisations, the challenge is one of scale. A business might need to understand hundreds or thousands of supplier agreements, customer contracts or legacy arrangements, often within a relatively short timeframe.

That could be prompted by an acquisition, a regulatory change, a contract remediation exercise or simply a need to gain better visibility of the rights and obligations sitting across a contract portfolio.

Traditionally, reviewing contracts at that scale can require considerable manual effort. AI creates an opportunity to approach the problem differently.

From reading contracts to interrogating them

The attraction of AI-assisted contract review is obvious. Technology can help process large numbers of documents, identify recurring provisions, and organise information into a structured format far faster than would traditionally have been possible.

But the technology itself is only part of the answer.

The effectiveness of an AI-assisted review depends heavily on what the technology is being asked to look for. A generic instruction to “review these contracts” is very different from a carefully constructed series of questions designed around a business’s objectives, risk profile and the legal issues it needs to understand.

For example, an organisation reviewing a portfolio following an acquisition might want to identify change of control and termination provisions. Another business could be interested in liability caps, price review mechanisms or renewal provisions.

A technology-led business may need greater visibility of intellectual property ownership and data protection obligations.

This is where legal expertise becomes particularly important.

Combining AI with legal judgement

At Irwin Mitchell, our approach to AI-assisted contract review brings together technology and specialist legal expertise.

Our commercial, technology and AI lawyers design and test bespoke prompts and review frameworks around the issues that matter to the client. The AI technology can then help identify and organise relevant information across multiple contracts, creating structured outputs that lawyers can interrogate and review.

Crucially, the process does not end with the AI output.

Every output is subject to lawyer review before legal advice is provided. That matters because contractual language does not always sit neatly within predefined categories. Meaning can depend on context, interaction with other clauses and, importantly, what the client is trying to achieve commercially.

AI can help find and structure information. The lawyer's role is to understand what that information means and why it matters.

Seeing the bigger picture across a contract portfolio

The real opportunity, therefore, is not simply to review individual contracts faster. It is to gain a clearer view across an entire contract estate.

A structured review can help an organisation identify patterns, highlight areas requiring closer legal attention and build a better picture of contractual rights, obligations, and potential risks.

This can be particularly useful during:

• M&A due diligence and post-acquisition integration;
• contract remediation programmes;
• supplier or customer contract reviews;
• regulatory compliance exercises; and
• wider projects where businesses need greater visibility of their contractual position.

Instead of treating every contract as an isolated document, AI-assisted analysis can help lawyers and clients understand what is happening across the portfolio and concentrate their attention on the contracts and provisions that warrant closer examination.

AI should enhance legal expertise, not replace it

There is understandable debate about the extent to which AI will change the legal profession. Contract review provides a good example of where we believe the greatest opportunity lies.

The objective is not to remove lawyers from the process. It is to use technology to reduce the time spent identifying and organising information, allowing lawyers to focus more of their attention on interpretation, judgement and commercially useful advice.

The combination is what matters: the scalability of AI, the judgement of experienced lawyers and a structured, auditable review methodology.

Used in that way, AI can make large-scale contract review more efficient while retaining the legal oversight and professional judgement businesses require.

As the technology develops, the question for organisations may become less about whether AI has a role in contract review and more about how to use it in a way that produces information they can genuinely act on.

At Irwin Mitchell, that is where we see the greatest potential: combining AI-enabled analysis with legal expertise to help businesses understand their contracts at scale and turn large volumes of contractual information into clearer, commercially useful insight.