How Our Legal Team Accelerates Contracting with Docusign AI-Assisted Review

Long, manual contract review cycles are a common problem for teams like sales and procurement. Like most in-house legal teams, one of the most important roles of the Docusign legal team is to support these and other departments in getting deals done faster and more efficiently.

Like our customers, Docusign relies on technology to keep business moving. For example, we expedite deal velocity by enabling our sales teams to self-serve many of their own agreements using Docusign CLM, eSignature, and seamless integration with Salesforce.

Our agreement templates and contract review playbooks contain our preferred agreement terms and fallback positions, but the process of comparing counterparty-proposed legal terms to Docusign's preferred positions can still be time-consuming. The process remains largely manual and often requires inefficient toggling between platforms.

Beyond being inefficient for our legal team, this process can create bottlenecks for teams like sales and procurement that rely on legal to get their deals done. It can also limit our ability to focus on more complex and strategic negotiations. That's why we became an early adopter of

Docusign AI-Assisted Review
, using the capability to address this big pain point.

Accelerating legal review with AI

With Docusign AI-Assisted Review, available inside Docusign CLM, our legal team has been able to minimize the number of manual steps required when negotiating agreements with customers and vendors. Our legal team was able to quickly build playbooks in AI-Assisted Review for the review of high-volume, commonly negotiated contracts, including non-disclosure and master services agreements. Rules can be written in plain language, so creating playbooks is simple. This makes it easy for our legal team to update playbooks as laws and regulations change, ensuring our company-wide guidance adapts as our business evolves.

The legal team leverages AI-Assisted Review to effectively review suggested edits to both Docusign's own templates and third-party paper. AI-Assisted Review handles the reading for our team, acting as a second set of eyes, automatically comparing the content to our playbooks and identifying non-compliant or risky language. AI-Assisted Review suggests which clauses and terms are misaligned with our company's standards, reducing the risk of human error. If edits are required, AI-Assisted Review also suggests language to bring terms back into alignment.

Reducing review and negotiation time with AI-Assisted Review

Our legal team's use of AI-Assisted Review has shown impactful results, with improvements in contract turnaround times, risk mitigation and compliance, and visibility for key internal stakeholders.

We significantly reduced the time spent on customer and vendor contract review, saving up to 15 minutes per NDA, and cutting MSA negotiation time by 30 minutes to an hour.* When you consider the volume of contracts we review weekly, this can add up to significant time saved for our team to spend on more complex negotiations. Not only does AI-Assisted Review suggest Docusign-approved redlines into an agreement - it also populates AI-generated comments to provide context and reasoning for each markup to reduce friction in the negotiation process.

AI-Assisted Review helps us mitigate risk by bringing greater consistency to key contractual terms like indemnification, termination, and governing law. It flags untracked changes from counter-parties, saving the team additional time and reducing the risk of oversight. The added speed and assurance throughout the review process has strengthened trust in the tool across the legal team.

As the team continues to leverage AI-Assisted Review, it's clear the tool is saving us time, delivering reliable results, and transforming how our legal team works. It's streamlining our process, strengthening how we support the businesses, and setting a new standard for efficiency and consistency in contract review.

Learn more about Docusign AI Assisted Review.

*Docusign internal data.