Precedent ReviewAI is a Microsoft Word Add-in that was developed to assist both business users and lawyers with reviewing legal contracts.

ReviewAI creates automated checklists that guide users through the key commercial issues they need to address in any contract, while helping them find relevant content.

ReviewAI checklists allow expert users to quickly and efficiently identify key commercial issues, automates simple content editing, and provides advisory features for less experienced users.

Over the course of the app’s development, I was responsible in tandem with our product team for developing the app concept, identifying key user concerns, workflows, and personas.

I was also responsible for wireframing, prototyping, user testing, and taking the app to the final product. Inclusive of this was the development of a full support portal with documentation and user tutorials.

Precedent ReviewAI is an evolution of two previous contract review products authorDOCS and authorAPPROVE.

authorDOCS was developed to help legal professionals find contract content while reviewing documents. authorAPPROVE was designed to automate reviewing and editing contracts for business users for faster contract approvals.

Precedent ReviewAI came about due to a need amongst mid to expert legal users to have their document reviews automated, have easy to work through checklists, and access to advice.

This app solves the problem of having access to expert advice, guided semi-automated review, and compliance with company standards in a collaborative environment.

One of the interesting problems we were trying to solve with ReviewAI was the lack of daily ‘stickiness’ or daily user retention our other products have. In general legal documents only require review by any given user a handful of times over the course of a month.

In creating checklist reviews we also created the ability to create blank AI-free checklists, the ability to add “jumpable” document references to any checklist item and share any checklist with another user. In doing this we generated a lot of excitement from users that would happily use these features outside of legal review.

In the legal industry adoption of technology has been slow. The legal ramifications of providing incorrect advice are huge. Trust thresholds that legal technology will provide the correct advice, in an open and easy to explain fashion is low.

This means that any technology needs to be an open box with easy to explain reasoning. It also means that most users do not have a high comfort level with software usage.

With Precedent ReviewAI we allowed legal teams to build the rules for their document reviews in an online console. Allowing them full control over what was looked for and why, and what advice was offered in any type of document review.

We also worked to make AI corrections simple and easy to perform. Mindful that incorrectly identified or missing document content must be as easy to correct as tagging a friend in Facebook. Anything more than one or two clicks to correct, removes user willingness to participate, and negatively impacts the user’s perception of the product’s accuracy.