Reviewing a Third-Party Contract
A counterparty sends you their standard agreement on their own paper. Before you can negotiate or sign, every clause has to be checked against your organization’s standards, and doing that by hand on every incoming document is slow and easy to get wrong.
A playbook review does that pass for you. Pactly compares the counterparty’s document against a playbook, then marks each position (one topic, like Limitation of Liability or Governing Law) with a compliance verdict and the reasoning behind it. This article covers the web-app side: getting a third-party document reviewed, and reading the results on the contract record.
How the review fits together
Section titled “How the review fits together”The review spans two surfaces, and each owns a different part of the job:
- Get the document into Pactly as a third-party contract. This is a contract-repository action, covered in Create a Contract. You upload the counterparty’s
.docx, set its category (the contract type, such as NDA), and pick the playbook to review against. The contract enters the repository as a playbook contract with In Review status. - Run the review and act on each position clause by clause. The interactive review (insert approved language, redline, record a decision) happens in the Pactly Word plugin, documented in Running a Playbook Review. This article does not repeat that flow.
What lives here on the web is the result: once a review has run, the contract record carries the playbook verdicts, so anyone who opens the contract, including approvers later in the lifecycle, can see exactly where it stands against your standards.
What the review checks
Section titled “What the review checks”The review compares the document against every position in the chosen playbook and assigns each one a verdict. There is no severity scale and no high/medium/low ranking. Each position resolves to one of five verdicts.
A relevant clause was found and it meets the position. Usually no action: skim, confirm, move on.
A relevant clause exists but deviates from your position. This is where the work is: negotiate a change, insert approved language, or accept the deviation with a written justification.
The position does not apply to this contract, so there is nothing to assess.
A relevant clause was found but the assessment was not conclusive. Read it yourself and make the call, the same as you would for Not compliant.
The position has not been analyzed yet, or it is awaiting your decision.
Read the results on the contract
Section titled “Read the results on the contract”Open the contract from the repository and go to its timeline. The playbook review appears there as a round entry, with Compliant and Not compliant counts in its header. Those counts tell you at a glance how far the document is from your standards.
Expand the entry to see the Playbook results. Positions are grouped by their playbook group, such as “Risk Allocation” or “Commercial Terms”. Each one shows its verdict, the AI reasoning behind it, and the clauses the verdict rests on.
For the full walkthrough of that view, drilling into a single position and re-running a review, see Reading Playbook Results in the Web App.
Acting on the results
Section titled “Acting on the results”Reading the verdicts tells you where the document stands. Acting on them happens in the Word plugin: insert your approved language, redline the clauses that fall short, and record a decision with a justification. Each position there offers approved clause language and AI drafting help. See Running a Playbook Review for that flow.
From there the contract follows the normal negotiation path: you record each exchange as a round, and the playbook results update per round so you can see whether a returned draft has moved closer to compliant. For the complete journey from upload through signature, see Reviewing a Vendor NDA.
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