A practical AI workflow
Build a contract review skill.
Your lawyers have already taught you how they negotiate. Their edits are sitting in your inbox. Turn that history into a reusable playbook.
Claude Code or Codex · read-only email access · lawyer in the loop
The opportunity
Your legal history is already a playbook.
This one is too easy to set up, and will save you so much money in the long run. If you're a brand doing less than $250M per year, it's likely that you outsource your contract review to a law firm. Those lawyers, rightfully so, can be $200 to $750 per hour, and they bill in 15 minute increments.
When you have a contract to review, whether it's for a SaaS tool, an influencer campaign, a new distribution channel, or a partnership event, those lawyer hours add up.
If you've operated for a couple of years, your email already documents the changes your attorneys consistently request. That is enough history to build a first-pass contract review skill. The point is not to replace counsel. It is to arrive at legal review with the repeatable work already done.
Copy / paste
Build it from your own history.
Keep the email connection read-only. Stop after extraction so you can correct the playbook before anything gets built.
Build me a reusable contract review skill from my own legal history.
STEP 1: Mine my email.
Search my inbox for every thread with my attorneys about contracts, going back 24 months. Look for redlines, marked-up drafts, "can you review this," attached .docx/.pdf agreements, and any back-and-forth about terms. Include threads where the lawyer replied with comments in the body instead of an attachment.
For each thread, pull out:
- contract type (SaaS/vendor, influencer or creator, distribution/retail, partnership or event, NDA, MSA/SOW, anything else)
- who the counterparty was and roughly how big the deal was
- every clause my counsel flagged
- the exact original language they wanted changed
- the exact replacement language they proposed
- what they explicitly said was fine to accept
- what the counterparty pushed back on and where we landed
STEP 2: Find the patterns.
Group everything by contract type. For each type, tell me:
- clauses my lawyers change almost every single time
- clauses they change sometimes, and what triggers it
- clauses they never touch
- my company's actual negotiated positions on: liability cap, indemnification, payment terms, IP ownership, term and termination, exclusivity, auto-renewal, governing law and venue, confidentiality, and for creator deals specifically, usage rights and usage term
Use my counsel's own wording verbatim wherever you can. Their phrasing is the asset here, not your paraphrase of it.
STEP 3: Show me the extraction before you build anything.
Print a summary of what you found: contract types covered, how many threads per type, and my standard position on each major clause. Mark anything you inferred from a single thread as low confidence. I will correct you before you continue. Do not skip this step.
STEP 4: Build the skill.
Create .claude/skills/contract-review/SKILL.md with name and description frontmatter, plus a reference file per contract type holding the detailed playbook. Keep SKILL.md short and route to the reference files.
The skill should take a contract and return:
- Contract type and a plain-English summary of what I am actually agreeing to, written for someone who is not a lawyer
- Deal-breakers: terms I have never accepted, with the reason
- Negotiate: terms my counsel changes, with exact suggested replacement language ready to paste into a redline
- Accept: terms that match my standard positions and need no work
- Missing: clauses my agreements normally contain that this one leaves out
- Escalate to a real lawyer if: a specific list of triggers, including deal size above a threshold I set, anything touching equity or securities, anything with a personal guarantee, non-US governing law, or any clause type the playbook has no history on
STEP 5: Test it before you call it done.
Run the skill against the two held-out contracts. Compare what it flagged to what my attorney actually flagged in those threads. Report hit rate, what it missed, and what it flagged that no lawyer cared about. Tighten the playbook based on the misses, then run it again.
RULES:
- This assists my review. It does not replace legal counsel, and the skill should say so in its own output.
- Never invent a negotiating position I do not have history for. If the playbook has no precedent, say so and route it to the escalation list.
- Keep my counsel's language exact. Do not smooth it out.
- Do not send, reply to, or draft any email during this. Read only.