So much of today’s contract negotiation process consists of redlining agreements — not to mention sending documents back and forth, in many ways. Here, lawyers justify their position on a contract change and, perhaps, come to understand the other party’s position. But nearly every participant in today’s negotiation process expects counterparties to exchange documents electronically. It’s becoming impolite — and often impractical — to send non-Word versions, for instance, during the negotiation phase.

Legal practitioners need to fully understand the intersection of legal technology and agreements, then, to grasp the future of negotiations. Helping to resolve many issues associated with the contracting process, legal platforms now come embedded with AI capabilities and advanced collaboration tools. This particular redlining functionality, moving forward, will be a must-have during negotiations, however complex they may be.

Using Legal Tech to Improve Cycle Times, Lower Costs

According to World Commerce and Contracting (World CC), there’s a clear link between the time spent in the negotiation cycle and economic costs to businesses. Reducing these cycle times can add roughly 10 days of economic activity, every year, World CC says. This is a significant impact on cycle time savings, in general. However, completing negotiations is the difficult part of contracting. At the bear minimum, all parties must agree on products, delivery schedules, and yes, pricing. A negotiation can be abandoned altogether if they fail to agree on these specific contract terms.

With the wise use of legal tech, though, this part of the contracting process can be streamlined and automated — or at least, intelligently augmented. And if abandonment rates can be reduced by at least a tenth of the existing rate through digitization, global GDP could increase by as much as half a trillion dollars, World CC says.

Typically speaking, legal platforms that have redlining functionality help legal identify problematic contract terms quickly. (That’s much better than assuming terms will just work out over time!) Basically, these systems provide an added level of assurance that legal terms won’t be changed during the negotiation process — without ever being called out. They also help analyze the many versions of agreements and flag those missed changes that would otherwise create risk and pain later on.

But on top of speeding up the negotiation process, by getting rid of manual review, the use of this AI-based software leads to what’s called “collaborative lawyering.” That means that lawyers on both sides of a deal will be more willing to work together. Internal collaborations end up being much speedier also, with contracting parties making and seeing changes all at once — within a single platform.

If someone involved in the negotiation process needs to take a question back to the business — and negotiating lawyers need to acknowledge this — contract redlining software allows lawyers to leave comments right in the system. Even when someone is unable to work in a collaborative fashion — for fear of losing prestige or seeing their internal negotiation dialog on full display — the software addresses their concerns, both operationally and programmatically, by allowing asynchronous collaboration. (That’s redlining within the platform but not at the same time, allowing attorneys to hold off sharing changes or internal comments until they’re ready to do so.)

Whatever the case may be, legal platforms with redlining functionality go a long way in simplifying the redlining process altogether. They help attorneys meet and exceed increasing contracting expectations. They help reduce their lower-value, ‘busy’ work, too.

Looking at the Future of Contract Redlining

The future of redlining will be filled with far more collaboration, then. With powerful, AI-based legal platforms, legal practitioners will merely click the ‘collaborate button’ and start their collaborative review in no time. They will be assured that certain changes will be accepted automatically or at least made public to reviewers. That’s if they meet certain approval or analysis rules, of course.

That all means you may never need to view an NDA, for example (unless you really want to do so!). Legal platforms will automatically make a request to change jurisdiction clauses or even the definition of confidential information. They will offer in-application comparisons and comment review. They will facilitate check-the-box-based acceptances or rejections of changes, and re-generate documents with all of the appropriate changes.

By intelligently augmenting the contract redlining process in this way, these AI-based, collaborative tools will support and improve the work of legal practitioners considerably. With a growing number of digital tools at their fingertips, more and more professionals will be supported in a variety of other legal functions, too.