Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is vital for organisations aiming to streamline legal operations and reduce risk. A key component of CLM, legal playbooks, offers a structured approach to contract drafting, review, and negotiation. With the advent of Generative AI (Gen AI), creating and maintaining intelligent legal playbooks has become faster and smarter.  Gen AI isn’t just a tool — it’s a strategic partner in creating intelligent legal playbooks — giving your company a competitive edge in contract negotiations and management.

But first, let’s understand the basics of legal playbooks and their relationship with CLM.

What Are Legal Playbooks?

Legal playbooks, often referred to as clause libraries, standardize responses for contract negotiations. They include:

• Standard company positions by provision.

• Pre-approved fallback language for common counterparty pushbacks.

• Escalation guidance for issues beyond the scope of the playbook.

Why Are Legal Playbooks Important?

Legal playbooks standardise responses to common contract pushbacks and empower non-legal personnel (e.g., procurement team members) to handle certain contract types or tasks independently. Playbooks are useful training tools for new contracts professionals who need to get up to speed with the organisation’s approach to managing risk.

How Do Legal Playbooks Enhance CLM?

CLM streamlines the end-to-end management of contracts to drive outcomes like shorter contract cycle times, better risk management, and lower revenue and cost leakage. Legal playbooks speed up and ensure consistency in negotiations and enforce escalations for approval. 

Building legal playbooks is labor intensive. No matter where your organisation is on the legal playbook journey, Gen AI can expedite the process and add enormous value.

No Playbooks? No Problem

Gen AI accelerates building playbooks from scratch.

Gen AI uses your standard template positions as benchmarks for a third-party template. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP), Gen AI detects deviations in counterparty templates from your standard positions, flags high-risk sections for review, and provides a quantified risk score for the contract or specific sections.
Gen AI analyses executed contracts and extracts fallback language that has been accepted in the past to complement the preferred positions in your standard templates.

Epiq is piloting using Gen AI to build first-draft playbooks — by breaking down provisions, identifying common pushbacks, and suggesting fallback language — without engaging lawyers. Lawyer time is then used more judiciously to refine these drafts.

From Basic Playbooks To Best in Class

Gen AI keeps legal playbooks current.

Most companies struggle to keep legal playbooks up to date with market and regulatory changes. Gen AI integrates with legal and regulatory databases to provide real-time alerts, ensuring the playbook reflects the latest compliance requirements.

Gen AI helps you customise legal playbooks for different stakeholders.

Gen AI tailors your playbooks based on user experience. Junior lawyers or negotiators in procurement, for instance, should have tighter playbook guardrails for negotiating legal terms than seasoned legal team members. Gen AI can automatically route certain provisions, or the whole contract, for approval based on risk level, contract type, or value.

Sharper Playbooks, Smarter Negotiations

Gen AI derives insights to hone and reduce negotiation cycles.

Gen AI reviews prior agreements for known counterparties to help negotiators prepare a targeted strategy. Armed with this knowledge, a negotiator can optimise the initial template for the counterparty and move to playbook fallbacks more quickly to reduce the number of negotiation cycles.

Gen AI analyses historical negotiation outcomes for specific provisions and shares the frequency at which standard and fallback positions have been accepted. These patterns inform the company where their templates and playbooks are potentially off-market, and where modifications could reduce negotiation time.
Gen AI flags which executed contracts have the highest risk scores and should be prioritised for renegotiation.

Conclusion

Although many companies prioritise building a centralized contracts repository or workflow automation when launching CLM, integrating legal playbooks early can deliver transformative results. By combining Gen AI automation with the expertise of legal professionals, organizations can scale operations, reduce risk, and empower teams — all without adding headcount.

Gen AI isn’t just a tool — it’s a strategic partner in creating intelligent legal playbooks, giving your company a competitive edge in contract negotiations and management.

Lindsey Pitt, Vice President, Contracts Solutions, Epiq

Lindsey Pitt brings more than 25 years of experience in legal operations and consulting to Epiq’s Contracts Solutions practice. Over the past decade, she has been responsible for consulting on, designing, and launching some of the legal industry’s most innovative tech-enabled contracts management solutions for clients that included Fortune 50 and Fortune Global 250 companies. She has also worked with clients on outside counsel spend analysis and legal transformation.