An energy storage company's legal team reviewed contracts that ran to thousands of pages once the supporting documents were counted, for every customer the company served. Each review took 24 to 72 hours of the team's time. Sales, compliance, and regulatory decisions all depended on that review.
Every agreement is now summarized on arrival. The summary is laid out the same way each time, covers the terms the legal team cares about, and links back to the supporting documents so a lawyer can check any line against the source. When a contract is updated, the summary updates with it.
The team can also ask questions of any contract in plain English and get an answer drawn from the document itself. The summary is where a review starts. The final judgment stays with the legal team.
Review time per contract fell from 24 to 72 hours to 1 to 2 hours, measured as the legal team's own time before and after. The work has saved $400K.
Any team that reads long documents for a living can start from a summary instead of page one. The same approach applies to claims, policies, and proposals.