Industrialize Legal Brilliance
AI Digital Playbooks make General Counsels stronger. They provide everything a static analog playbook does—rules, guidance—but give negotiators flexibility when necessary. The true game changer? AI Digital Playbooks are bespoke, which means organizations of all sizes can build out—and constantly adjust as required—their negotiations.
Certain types of contracts do not lend themselves to an automated self-service approach. Instead, bespoke playbooks include guidelines enabling the flexibility to accommodate specific circumstances of the underlying transaction on a case-by-case basis. For example, an organization may decide that the contract underpinning a key customer or vendor relationship—with high risk or value attached to the contract—is worth giving the contract negotiator discretion to push for an array of terms, rather than providing a singular path to pursue.
Alternatively, a contract may relate to a subject matter area that is changing rapidly, such as Data Processing Agreements and the increasingly regulated world of data privacy. In these scenarios, as the regulatory framework changes, so too should the playbook. In these situations, historical institutional knowledge that would form the basis for a typical, pattern-based and highly repetitive AI-approach cannot accommodate newly passed statues, regulations, or business priorities.
The implementation of an AI Digital Playbook provides significant benefits through automating the negotiation of appropriate provisions and presenting organizational guidance as required to complete the remainder of the negotiation. When constructing review guidelines, many organizations encounter what one might call a “playbook paradox,” due to the following contrasting interests:
One such benefit is to drive down the cost of review and/or free up resources for higher value tasks. As organizations strive to “right-source” work by putting it in the hands of less expensive resources, a well structured AI Digital Playbook can facilitate such goals.
In other words, more work can be handled by lower-cost resources and less by expensive escalation teams. An AI Digital Playbook reduces the number of escalations required and empowers those same resources to negotiate transactions with higher value or risk. And by automating the negotiation of standard provisions, there is a significant reduction in the number of hours needed to pore over a single contract.
A key benefit is a reduction in the average time needed to go from the first draft of a contract to execution. Escalations of negotiations carry built-in lag time, with one team member waiting on the escalation team to have an open window of time to opine on the given negotiation. By reducing the number of escalations required, these lag time periods no longer contribute to delays in getting contracts executed.
An AI Digital Playbook further accelerates execution time by reducing the back-and-forth between the parties. Even the most experienced of contract negotiators sometimes encounters a tendency to optimize for the present scenario and push for low-value negotiation points. This is often the case even if the negotiations were consciously omitted from a playbook due to the low-value of winning the negotiation point outweighing the anticipated cost of pushing for it. AI Digital Playbooks provide guard rails for a negotiator. If the playbook does not suggest an edit, the contract negotiator must think twice before pursuing the edit.
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In order for an AI Digital Playbook to be effective for a large enterprise, different teams and departments must work together toward shared goals. In many organizations, it’s necessary to establish a designated team with the purpose of collaborating on and contributing to the development of policies and procedures that will deliver continuous improvement of AI initiatives.