What Actually Happens When AI Reviews Your Contract

"AI contract review" usually means one of two things. Either a tool has been trained on a huge pile of contracts and flags language that looks unusual compared to the average: a pattern-matching exercise, not a legal one. Or it asks an LLM to "review this contract for risks" and gets back a plausible-sounding list that isn't checked against anything at all.

Neither actually answers the question a person uploading a contract wants answered: does this specific clause hold up under the actual law where I am? A termination clause that's perfectly normal in one jurisdiction can be flatly unenforceable in another. Generic pattern-matching can't tell you that: it doesn't know what jurisdiction you're in, let alone what that jurisdiction's employment or tenancy legislation actually requires.

How it actually works

When you upload a contract to CitedAnswers, you first choose two things: the type of document (employment contract, lease, commercial agreement, and so on) and the jurisdiction it's governed by. That second choice is the one most tools skip entirely, and it's the one that actually matters.

From there, the contract is checked clause by clause against the real legislation of that jurisdiction: the same indexed Acts and regulations CitedAnswers' regular question-answering already draws from, not a generic "contract law" training set. A termination clause gets checked against actual employment legislation. A bond clause gets checked against actual tenancy legislation. If a topic a contract of that type normally needs to cover is entirely absent, that gets flagged too, as a missing clause rather than a risky one.

What you actually get back

For every issue found, you see the same four things side by side: the current clause as written, what the actual legislation requires, a suggested rewrite that would bring it into line, and a plain-English explanation of why it matters: what happens if it's left as-is. Where relevant case law exists, it's cited too, with a link to the actual judgment, not just a case name dropped in for flavour.

The whole thing sits next to a viewer of your original document, so you're never reading a flag in isolation: you can see exactly where in the contract it came from. A compliance score summarises the overall picture, but the score isn't really the point; the point is that every single flag traces back to a specific section of a specific Act, the same standard CitedAnswers holds every other answer to.

See it in action

Here's a full walkthrough: uploading a contract, choosing a jurisdiction, and going through the flagged issues one by one.

Try it now

You can run a Contract Review as a one-off report through the Legal Marketplace, no account or subscription needed. Upload a contract and see the flagged issues before you pay anything. It's also included in every paid subscription plan if you're reviewing contracts regularly.