Prompt of the week: Review and compare a contract to your historical contracts

Ivo Assistant can now review a contract in the context of your historical agreements housed in Ivo Intelligence. There is so much valuable knowledge in your contract portfolio about historical negotiating positions, or how a company tends to negotiate specific provisions, which is too often locked away in documents or inside lawyers’ heads. Now, Assistant makes that knowledge available to make negotiation easier and contracting more consistent. 

Benchmark your contracts against historical precedents 

This new capability is beneficial for in-house legal teams for a number of reasons: 

It turns your past agreements into institutional knowledge. Many legal teams have years of negotiated contracts sitting in a repository, but that institutional knowledge is locked away. Now, all of that historical intelligence is both accessible and actionable. You can actually use every precedent your team has ever set in your next negotiation.

It gives negotiators a defensible baseline. A difficult part of contract negotiation is knowing what the market standard is for your own organization. With this new capability, teams can now point to concrete historical data in their negotiations, e.g. "We've accepted this clause in 12 of our last 15 agreements,” rather than relying on historical memory. 

You no longer have to reinvent the wheel with every contract. Lawyers spend a shocking amount of time digging through past agreements to remember how they've handled a particular clause before. This reduces the research time from hours to minutes, and provides reliable, accurate results as well. 

It standardizes legal processes. Legal ops leaders know that legal teams need consistent, repeatable processes to scale and provide business value. Being able to benchmark a new contract against the historical norm creates consistency across regions and teams, and helps reinforce standard procedures. 

Example prompts for comparing new agreements to historical ones

Here are a few prompts that you can use with Ivo Assistant to take advantage of comparing new contracts against historical precedents : 

• Review this agreement with my contracts in the Repository with a governing law in [State/Country]. Summarize any critical, high and medium risks that I should be aware of.
• Review this agreement based on my current playbook and contracts of the same type in my Repository from the last 2 years.
• Generate a risk summary of this contract based on my previous agreements. Redline this agreement based on the summary.
• Create a downloadable report of this risk summary.
• Draft an email summarizing the risks of this contract compared to historical precedents. 
• Review this agreement for any typos, cross-references and defined terms.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind as you prompt Assistant: 

1. Always ask for a risk analysis before asking Assistant to generate redline suggestions.
2. Assistant is capable of reviewing the document against uploaded agreements, precedents in your repository, and your playbook positions at the same time. However, we suggest that you narrow the criteria for a faster and more relevant result. 
3. If there are any sections or topics in an agreement that you are particularly concerned about, run a review with Assistant for those topics only and it will return a detailed analysis and actionable redlines.

We’re excited about this new capability, as we think it will have numerous benefits for in-house legal teams. Give it a try and let us know what you think.