Enabling Contract Review with AI: Overcoming Challenges in Modern Business
1. Real-World Pain Points
A contract is a vital legal document that facilitates value exchange between businesses. However, statistics from China's National Bureau of Statistics reveal that contract disputes have been rising steadily since 2009, with an annual increase of 10% to 20%. Meanwhile, as businesses expand their operations, the complexity of commercial cooperation modes and the number of contracts grow exponentially. Traditional manual review methods are struggling to keep up, bogged down by inefficiencies, high risks, and uncontrollable costs. A single complex contract may require days or even months of human review, with potential legal pitfalls lurking beneath the surface. The traditional contract management model has become a hidden obstacle hindering business development.
2. AI Breakthrough
To break through this predicament, three-dimensional earth (threeD) developed an AI-powered smart body based on SunwayLink's intelligent platform. This AI-powered smart body is not just a simple tool combination; it fully leverages SunwayLink's knowledge management, intelligent body building, and application integration capabilities to create a comprehensive digital legal expert.
At the cognitive level, it uses a large-scale language model as its "brain" to integrate industry-specific knowledge graphs. This dual-cognitive intelligence allows it to understand laws and regulations better than traditional lawyers do. In terms of decision-making, it sets up a risk assessment system:
A legal compliance module focuses on matching contract clauses with relevant laws and regulations. It also incorporates real-time updates from databases and case law libraries. When detecting potentially violating provisions, the system automatically marks risks and provides corresponding legal interpretations and mitigation strategies to ensure contractual compliance.
A commercial performance module integrates transaction partner credit data, industry-specific standards, and dynamic indicators. Based on payment cycles, delivery standards, and core contract clauses, it generates risk warnings and pushes forward assurance proposal to reduce uncertainty in commercial transactions.
An operational execution module focuses on assessing the feasibility of contract clauses, linking internal process norms with historical execution records. For ambiguous or unclear clauses, the system compares standardized operation templates to identify obstacles and provides detailed revision proposals, enhancing contractual operability.
This "risk categorization + solution" decision-making model elevates contract review from discovering problems to solving them.
At the operational level, it integrates with CLM (contract lifecycle management), CRM, and other systems for seamless workflow execution: from contract uploading, reviewing, and revising to archiving, as well as post-execution reminders. This "human + agent" dual-safety model leverages dynamic assessment capabilities while ensuring risk mitigation through human review, achieving high efficiency and safety in contract management.
3. Implementation Plan
3.1 System Functions
1. Smart Classification: The system has intelligent classification capabilities, able to automatically identify and classify different types of contracts (e.g., procurement contracts, labor contracts, technical service contracts) while extracting contract information.
2. Risk Detection: The system can intelligently detect high-risk clauses in contracts and automatically highlight them, as well as provide smart recommendations based on relevant case law and regulations to assist users in identifying and addressing potential risks.
3. Negotiation Bot: The system includes a negotiation bot that can simulate counterparties' positions during negotiations, generate negotiation scripts, and push forward strategy proposals for users, providing valuable support for contract negotiations.
4. Auto Revision: The system supports seamless integration with Word plugins, allowing users to insert modification annotations and apply the system's revision suggestions with a single click, greatly simplifying the contract revision process and enhancing work efficiency.
5. Version Diff: The system can compare different versions of contracts for intelligent analysis, tracking changes made by previous reviewers while presenting change histories in a visual format to facilitate users' understanding of contractual evolution.
3.2 Technical Implementation
Foundational technology principles:
Based on large language models like deepseek and qwen, the system leverages strong semantic understanding capabilities to precisely handle complex tasks such as contract classification, risk clause recognition, and negotiation script generation, while integrating enterprise-specific knowledge through RAG (Relevant And General) frameworks.
Mult-agent coordination mechanism enables the entire processing workflow to be more decentralized and professionalized. The classification agent focuses on initial contract type filtering and feature marking using LLMs, while the risk recognition agent uses RAG to search for relevant case law and risk models. The negotiation strategy agent specializes in integrating counterparties' historical behavior data and real-time negotiation dynamics. Each agent communicates through a unified task scheduling center, such as classification agent output triggering risk recognition agent loading corresponding industry-specific risk rule libraries, or negotiation strategy agent generating script suggestions serving as reference for revision agents.
SunwayLink's backend support:
1. Through SunwayLink's knowledge management capabilities, integrate enterprise contract templates, law firm case libraries, and customer information libraries.
2. Using SunwayLink's document analysis components, extract content from contracts and perform format parsing.
3. Using SunwayLink's multi-step iterative and jump reasoning capabilities, support the handling of super-large contracts, ensuring content continuity, and building contract review workflows through agent development capabilities.
4. Through SunwayLink's integration capabilities, connect to contract management systems to enhance overall workflow efficiency.
4. Implementation Effects
A leading real estate group experienced the following benefits after deploying this solution:
1. Review efficiency skyrocketed: Manual intervention in review work decreased by 80%.
2. Risk control quality improved: The system has run without detecting any significant risks, effectively avoiding potential lawsuits and compliance issues.
3. Process cycle compression: The average contract approval period shrank from 10 days to just 3 days, significantly accelerating project launches and fund flows.
4. Collaboration efficiency improved: Contract text coordination rates among law firms, businesses, and regulatory bodies jumped from less than 5% before deployment to over 60%, greatly reducing costs due to clause ambiguities, format discrepancies, or risk oversights.
5. Future Outlook
1. AI-driven smart contract generation: Break through the current "review-centric" model by generating initial draft contracts based on negotiation outcomes, business scenarios, and regulatory requirements. This not only precludes review cycles but also significantly enhances contractual efficiency and compliance.
2. Predictive risk control and dynamic optimization: Fuse external market data, judicial dynamics, and enterprise historical performance data to enable the AI-powered smart body to predict potential disputes and key risks. In response to changes in market environments or transaction partner credit scores, it will proactively push forward optimization proposals, transforming contract management from static documentation to a dynamic risk shield.
From "human review" to "digital law," this is not just a tool upgrade but a fundamental restructuring of the business contract management model. Based on SunwayLink's intelligent platform, the AI-powered smart body with its "cognitive- decision-making-action" closed-loop capabilities can break through the efficiency bottleneck and risk fog in modern business contracting.