Contract review is integral to modern legal practice, but lawyers often find themselves slowed down by repetitive administrative tasks like reviewing clauses, cross-referencing terms, and ensuring compliance. This delays business decisions and limits the legal team’s ability to focus on more strategic, impactful work.

In this blog, we explore the best AI tools for contract review in 2025, with a look at their features, benefits, and potential drawbacks. By the end, you'll have a clearer understanding of how AI can streamline review workflows and enhance your team's efficiency.

Can AI review legal contracts?

Yes, AI can review legal contracts. AI systems can analyse, summarise, and identify key clauses in legal documents with speed and accuracy. 

This could be useful for:

Clause identification

AI identifies key clauses like confidentiality agreements, termination conditions, and dispute resolution mechanisms. For example, in a non-disclosure agreement, it highlights whether confidentiality obligations are mutual or one-sided.

Risk assessment

AI flags risky or unusual terms. For instance, in a supplier agreement, it might alert legal teams to uncapped indemnity clauses.

Contract summarisation

AI generates concise summaries of lengthy contracts. A 50-page service agreement, for example, can be summarised into a one-page overview of payment terms, obligations, and warranties.

Compliance checks

AI verifies compliance with regulations. For example, it ensures GDPR-compliant clauses are included in data processing agreements.

Version comparison

AI detects changes or discrepancies between contract versions, such as added auto-renewal clauses in a revised draft.

Read more: Can AI review legal contracts? Everything you need to know

What is AI contract review and how does it work?

AI contract review uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to analyse legal documents. These technologies enable AI to extract critical information, flag potential risks, and suggest revisions. AI tools are trained on vast datasets, allowing them to recognise patterns and understand legal terminology.

How AI reviews legal contracts

AI systems follow structured workflows to analyse contracts. 

These steps often include:

1. Document ingestion: AI ingests and digitises legal documents in various formats, such as PDFs or Word files.

2. Entity extraction: AI extracts critical information such as party names, dates, and monetary amounts for easy reference.

3. Clause recognition: AI identifies and organises key clauses in the document. It recognises sections such as indemnities, liabilities, terminations, or confidentiality terms. In a vendor contract, AI might highlight the indemnity clause that limits the vendor’s liability to the contract’s total value, flagging it for review.

4. Risk assessment: AI evaluates terms and highlights red flags or unusual provisions that deviate from standard practices. In an employment contract, AI may flag a clause that restricts an employee from working in a broad geographic area post-termination, noting it as overly restrictive and possibly unenforceable.

5. Compliance checks: AI cross-references contract terms with applicable regulations to ensure compliance. In a data processing agreement, AI might check for the inclusion of GDPR-compliant clauses, such as data subject rights and breach notification timelines.

6. Version comparison: AI compares multiple versions of a contract to detect changes, additions, or deletions.

7. Summarisation: AI generates concise summaries of lengthy contracts, outlining critical terms and obligations. For example, a 100-page partnership agreement could be summarised into a brief highlighting revenue-sharing terms, dispute resolution mechanisms, and termination conditions.

8. Reporting: AI generates detailed reports based on contract reviews, categorising findings and recommending actions. For example, after analysing 500 supplier agreements, AI provides a report listing contracts with unusual payment terms or missing standard liability caps.

Read more: Goodbye to the grind: How legal AI is streamlining repetitive work

What is... Natural language processing (NLP)?

NLP enables AI to understand and interpret legal language. It identifies contextual meaning, detects anomalies, and ensures compliance with specified standards.

What is... Machine learning in legal applications?

Machine learning models improve over time by analysing vast datasets. These models learn to identify patterns, improving their accuracy in detecting issues and suggesting resolutions.

Best AI tools for contract review in 2025

1. LEGALFLY

LEGALFLY is an intuitive, AI-powered platform designed to cut contract review, drafting and discovery time from hours to seconds. It can review hundreds of contracts in seconds and automatically redraft with compliant clauses. 

It always redacts sensitive information before analysing documents, ensuring both confidentiality and compliance with data protection standards. 

The platform’s custom agent functionality enables legal teams to train AI models using their own legal and financial documents, creating bespoke AI systems tailored to their unique legal requirements and workflows. It also offers templates.

LEGALFLY integrates directly with Microsoft Word, allowing users to review, and refine legal documents within a familiar interface. It supports multiple languages and jurisdictions, making it particularly effective for organisations operating across diverse legal systems. 

Read more: 5 must-haves for secure legal AI

2. Legly

Legly is a Swiss company that provides contract analysis with a focus on small and mid-sized firms. 

Features include deal-breaker highlighting, metadata extraction, and contract portfolio visualisation.

Legly has an intuitive interface and is cost-effective, but may lack the advanced customisation options found in higher-end platforms.

3. Spellbook

Spellbook integrates with word processors using GPT-4o and other large language models, offering AI-driven suggestions for drafting and reviewing legal documents. 

It’s useful for contract drafting, clause modifications and ensuring compliance with standard practices. 

Spellbook’s integration with widely used software ensures accessibility and ease of use for lawyers and legal teams. Additional tools may be needed for lifecycle management.

4. Evisort

Evisort uses AI to automate contract lifecycle management, covering tasks from drafting to renewal. 

It has intelligent search capabilities, allowing users to locate specific clauses or terms within large document repositories. 

Evisort is particularly favoured by enterprise-level legal operations for its scalability and reporting features that provide actionable insights.

5. Luminance

Luminance uses advanced machine learning to identify anomalies, flag risks, and ensure regulatory compliance during contract review. 

It is designed to support both in-house legal teams and law firms. 

Its visualisation tools simplify the interpretation of complex datasets, making contract analysis more transparent and efficient.

6. Kira Systems

Kira Systems, now part of Litera, specialises in extracting and analysing contract provisions using AI. 

It is used for due diligence and large-scale document review projects, thanks to its ability to process vast volumes of data accurately. 

It allows users to customise the platform for specific contract types and industries.

7. ContractPodAi

ContractPodAi offers an end-to-end solution for contract management. 

Its AI features include clause identification, risk assessment, and compliance tracking, making it a good tool for managing legal agreements.

8. BlackBoiler

BlackBoiler is an AI-powered contract review tool designed to automate the analysis, review, and revision of contracts. 

It can compare incoming contracts against an organisation's playbook, offering automated redlines and suggested edits. 

It integrates with document management systems such as iManage and NetDocuments.

9. DocJuris

DocJuris is a contract review and negotiation platform aimed at accelerating the contract negotiation process while ensuring compliance. 

It can identify deviations from standard terms and offers negotiation playbooks to guide decision-making. 

DocJuris supports real-time collaboration and workflow integrations, allowing teams to review, edit, and approve contracts more efficiently.

The benefits of using AI for legal contract review

Accelerated deal cycles: AI significantly speeds up contract review and negotiation, helping businesses close deals faster and improve time-to-revenue.

Faster contract analysis: AI drastically reduces the time needed to review contracts. This allows the legal team to focus on high-value tasks, as well as enabling businesses to recognise revenue sooner and improve cash flow.

More certainty: AI ensures critical clauses and risks are identified early, minimising last-minute disputes or renegotiations that can delay deal completion.

Smarter resource allocation: Automating contract review reduces the need for manual intervention, allowing legal teams to focus on negotiat

Streamlined compliance: Automated compliance reviews ensure that contracts meet regulatory standards upfront, reducing bottlenecks in finalising agreements and avoiding post-deal liabilities.

Cost savings: Automating repetitive tasks lowers operational costs by reducing reliance on manual labour.

The limitations of AI in reviewing legal contracts

Can AI understand legal nuances?

While AI excels in identifying standardised clauses and risks, it struggles with the subtleties of legal interpretation. Contracts often contain context-dependent terms and jurisdiction-specific language that demand a nuanced understanding of law and intent. This limitation becomes evident when assessing provisions designed to address bespoke scenarios or regulatory exceptions.

Challenges in contextual and complex language

Legal language often includes layered meanings, implicit references, and interpretative dependencies. AI’s deterministic models can miss these subtleties, leading to oversights or misclassifications. For example, distinguishing between "material breach" and "minor breach" may require assessing the surrounding contractual ecosystem, a task AI cannot fully automate.

Dependence on high-quality training data

The reliability of AI tools hinges on the quality and diversity of their training datasets. If these datasets lack representation of diverse legal scenarios or jurisdictional variations, AI outputs can skew towards generalisations. Poorly curated datasets may embed biases that affect the tool’s ability to process nuanced language fairly.

Security of data

The use of AI in legal processes necessitates handling sensitive and confidential information. Ensure that AI vendors adhere to stringent data protection standards and comply with local regulations.  

Can AI replace lawyers?  

Human oversight is still essential

AI’s capabilities are powerful but inherently limited. It operates on predefined algorithms and patterns, which restrict its ability to interpret intent or adapt to unique legal contexts. Human professionals remain indispensable for navigating ambiguous terms, reconciling conflicting clauses, and applying ethical judgment—areas where subjective analysis is paramount.

Collaborating with AI tools

AI is best viewed as a collaborator rather than a replacement. By automating routine administrative tasks, such as clause extraction or risk flagging, AI enables lawyers to redirect their expertise to higher-value activities, including negotiation and strategy. This synergy between human judgment and machine efficiency enhances both productivity and decision-making.

Ethical considerations  

AI systems should be transparent, unbiased, and compliant with data protection regulations. Users should consider the potential for AI to perpetuate systemic biases present in training data, implementing measures to mitigate such risks. Human oversight ensures accountability, safeguarding both the integrity of legal practice and client trust.

Should you use AI to review legal contracts?

If you are looking to enhance efficiency and accuracy in contract review, AI tools can offer significant value. These platforms deliver faster analysis, reduce manual workloads, and enable legal teams to focus on more strategic work. 

With many options available, it comes down to selecting a platform that prioritises security and accuracy to ensure your organisation’s data remains protected and the results are reliable.

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