Can an agent review contracts?
Half. An agent reads a contract faster than you and reliably extracts the terms, deadlines and deviations from your standard. What it cannot do is tell you which risk actually matters given what you know about the other side.
- Hours back per week
- 5
- Human cost
- €3,000–8,000/mo in legal fees
- Agent cost
- €30–90/mo
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Extract key terms
YESParties, value, dates, notice periods, renewal, liability caps, governing law.
Compare against your standard
YESFlags every deviation from your playbook, which is the bulk of first-pass review.
Spot missing protections
MOSTLYNotices the absent limitation of liability. Cannot judge if it matters here.
Flag unusual clauses
YESCatches the buried auto-renewal and the one-sided indemnity.
Assess real risk
HALFRisk depends on the counterparty, the leverage and the relationship. It sees the text only.
- Yours
Approve or sign
NOT YETBinding commitment with a named human on it.
- Yours
Negotiate redlines
NOT YETIt can draft alternatives. Deciding what to concede is a commercial act.
3/5 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Signing
- Risk decisions
- Negotiation
- Anything above your materiality threshold
How this goes wrong
Treating "no issues found" as clearance. An agent checks against the playbook you gave it, so it is silent about every risk your playbook does not already name.
What it needs access to
- Document storage
- Contract templates and playbook
- Signature platform
- Calendar
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my contract reviewer, not my lawyer. For each incoming contract: extract parties, value, term, notice period, auto-renewal, liability cap, indemnities, IP ownership, termination rights and governing law into a summary table. Compare every clause against our playbook in Drive and list each deviation with the exact wording and what our standard says. Flag anything unusual, one-sided, or absent that our standard normally includes. State plainly which points you think need a lawyer and why. Add all key dates to the calendar with 90 days notice. Do not approve, do not sign, do not send redlines to the other side, and do not tell me a contract is fine.
Questions people ask
Can this replace a lawyer for routine contracts?
It can replace the first pass on high-volume, low-value agreements — NDAs, standard supplier terms — and give a lawyer a head start on everything else. What it cannot replace is someone accountable for the advice.
Want the part that works actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to Document storage and Contract templates and playbook, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up a contract review agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.