How to Streamline the Internal Contract Review Process

If you’ve successfully used AI risk scoring to triage your vendor reviews, you might be wondering how to solve the internal review cycle next.

More specifically, how to streamline the internal contract review process so that different teams can provide input without it getting buried in an inbox or stuck in a "Reply All" chain?

If that’s you, you’re not alone.

Here are the 5 steps to streamlining your internal contract review process:

Step 1: Fragment the Review by Domain Expertise

Not every department needs to read every page of a contract.

To speed up the process, your contract review workflow should automatically "tag" specific sections for specific stakeholders. By isolating the relevant clauses, you prevent "review fatigue" and ensure people only focus on what they are qualified to approve.

We recommend starting with these common domain-specific triggers:

• Finance: Focuses on payment terms, tax obligations, and billing milestones.
• IT & Security: Focuses on data protection, security audits, and breach liability.
• Legal: Focuses on indemnity, governing law, and overall contractual risk.

Step 2: Implement "Parallel" Rather Than "Sequential" Review

One of the biggest mistake companies can make is waiting for one department to finish their redlines before sending the document to the next.

This creates a "relay race" that adds days to every deal.

Instead, trigger a parallel review, where all involved teams can comment on their respective sections simultaneously.

Try setting up your workflow to allow:

• Simultaneous Redlining: Letting IT mark up security requirements while Legal is still refining the liability section.
• Real-Time Conflict Resolution: Ensuring that if one team’s change affects another’s risk profile, both parties are alerted instantly.

Step 3: Use Clause-Level Permissions to Maintain Integrity

To prevent non-legal teams from accidentally deleting critical protections, you should implement clause-level permissions. This ensures that while a stakeholder can suggest changes to their specific domain, they cannot edit "locked" clauses outside of their expertise.

We recommend these permission tiers:

• Admins (Legal/Ops): Full edit rights across all contract clauses.
• Specialists (Finance/IT/HR): Edit rights only on pre-assigned clauses relevant to their role.
• Viewers (Sales/Account Management): Read-only access to track the review progress.

Step 4: Automate Approval Requests Based on Deviation

Your workflow should only trigger a "Manual Approval" request if the redlines in a specific section exceed a certain risk threshold. If the counterparty accepts your standard terms, that department should be "Auto-Approved" out of the loop.

Consider setting triggers for these:

• Commercial Triggers: If the vendor insists on a 90-day payment cycle instead of your standard 60 days.
• Technical Triggers: If a vendor refuses to provide required compliance documentation (like a SOC2 report).
• Legal Triggers: If any "High-Weight" clause from your playbook is modified.

Step 5: Establish a "Single Source of Truth" for Internal Comments

Nothing kills a deal faster than "Version Fatigue"—where teams are redlining different versions of the same Word doc. Your review cycle should happen within a contract review platform where all internal chatter and redlines are tracked in a single, live audit trail.

Your central review hub should provide:

• Internal-Only Comments: A private chat layer for internal teams to discuss strategy before sending redlines back to the counterparty.
• Live Progress Tracking: So Sales knows exactly who has the "ball" (e.g., "Pending IT Security Approval") at any given moment.
• Version Stacking: Automatically capturing every iteration so no one ever works off an outdated draft.

Conclusion

And there you have it!

We hope this article helps you move from a clunky "relay race" to a high-speed, parallel review cycle that keeps all your internal teams in perfect sync.

If you’re struggling with internal bottlenecks and want to see how we automate the hand-off between departments without losing control of the contract, feel free to book a demo with us.

Otherwise, check out our next article on how to optimize contract templates for faster reviews.