Financial operations · UK · 2024
Contract review assistant
Internal name: ClauseDesk · Client brand withheld under NDA
A retrieval-backed assistant that drafts a first pass on contracts against the firm’s own playbook — a lawyer still signs off.
Faster first pass
review cycle on routine agreements
The situation
Legal spent hours hunting the last similar agreement and re-checking the same clauses. A public chatbot was not an option: documents could not leave the tenancy, and wrong answers were worse than slow ones.
What we did
- Ingest only approved templates and prior reviewed contracts, with access control.
- Answers grounded in retrieved clauses, with the source passage attached.
- Human review queue: the tool never “files” a document on its own.
- Evaluation set from real (redacted) examples before anyone used it on live work.
What changed
Routine first-pass review is shorter. Unusual clauses still go to a person. The firm has a log of what the model cited, not a mystery chat.
Stack
PythonRAG pipelinevector searchFastAPINext.js