Ask what an AI contract review tool actually does and most vendors give you a marketing answer: it reviews contracts. STIV Legal's answer is more specific, because the mechanism is more specific — every review runs against a playbook your legal team defines, not a generic sense of what a solid contract looks like.
Step one: the playbook does the judging, not the model
Before STIV Legal reviews anything, your team defines approved positions, fallback language, and escalation rules for the agreement types it's permitted to touch. This is the part most AI contract tools skip, and it's the part that determines whether the output is useful. A model that's merely competent at contracts in the abstract doesn't know that your standard indemnification cap is 12 months of fees, or that a specific vendor category always needs a data processing addendum attached. Your playbook does.
What gets flagged, and what gets left alone
- Clauses that match an approved position are left alone — no redline, no flag, because there's nothing for a human to weigh in on.
- Clauses that deviate from the playbook get a targeted redline, with the fallback language proposed alongside the original.
- Ambiguous language that doesn't clearly match or clearly deviate gets escalated to the designated reviewer with the relevant context attached, rather than silently guessed at.
- Agreement types outside what the playbook covers aren't reviewed at all — STIV Legal doesn't improvise on a contract type it wasn't configured for.
The result is a first pass that spends a reviewer's attention on the two or three clauses that actually depart from your standard position, instead of a full read-through of a routine NDA or MSA that was likely fine to begin with.
The gate that doesn't move
None of this changes who has authority to send a redline or execute a document. Every output routes through the same approval model described in how STIV's approval gates work — an authorized reviewer signs off before anything leaves the building. What changes is how much of the document they have to read closely before they do.
This is deliberately not a replacement for legal judgment. It's a way of making sure the judgment your team already has gets applied to a contract in minutes instead of after end-of-day, and gets applied consistently across every agreement's routine terms — not just the ones a reviewer happens to remember to double-check.