Back-and-forth, email-based contract negotiation has proven insufficient in the modern age. Version confusion, missed changes, delayed input and approvals, and other deleterious consequences can arise. On the other hand, contract artificial intelligence is speeding up contract negotiations, reducing errors, and empowering contract management personnel to put their best foot forward - with CobbleStone proving to be a leader in next-generation negotiation technology. Here's how.
Why Negotiation Software Matters
Contract negotiation software is used to automate and empower collaboration with counterparties, contract optimization, and approval of a contract. Without it, there are negotiation and approval bottlenecks, the erroneous approval of suboptimal contract language, lost versions of a contract for reference (and therefore lost edits), and more. Poor contract management directly impacts an organization's bottom line, so it's important to identify how AI and automation directly address revenue-leaking issues.
Quick Guide: Core Features Expected in Modern Negotiation Platforms
1. All modern contract negotiation platforms should feature AI-first capabilities.
2. There should be core capabilities for centralized contract collaboration.3. Integrated surgical auto-redlining tools are an indicator of a modern solution.
Surgical AI Auto-Redlining
Surgical auto-redlining is powered by contract artificial intelligence and allows you to automate the inclusion of your organization's preferred language. AI compares the counterparty's language to your playbook, and deviations are automatically flagged. The redlines are surgical, replacing words and phrases rather than entire clauses where applicable. This feature is extremely helpful for speeding up negotiations and making contracts more favorable while allowing legal professionals to focus on more strategic work.
AI Contract Sentiment Analysis & Risk Scoring
Contract sentiment analysis takes clauses and sections of a contract and presents them as positive, negative, or neutral in sentiment from the perspective of either you or your counterparty. This feature is helpful in consideration of contract positioning. Leading contract negotiation software also features risk detection and insights to help legal teams to priorize review tasks instead of not knowing where to start.
Real-Time Online Collaborative Editing
Award-winning contract negotiation software solutions feature browser-based, real-time contract collaboration with multiple counterparties. Concurrent editing with comment threads, track changes, date/time/user stamps, and real-time visibility help foster a seamless and inclusive contract collaboration experience that keeps parties accountable, aware, and involved. No more naming versions like “final_v5_final_FINAL.docx” after being unsure of when a collaboration will actually end.
Clause Libraries, Playbooks & Clause Governance
Organizations need standardized clause libraries to maintain a consistent legal identity and to help ensure ready access to clauses that work in real negotiation situations. It's important to have fallback, alternative, and non-negotiable clauses all classified and ready to use, especially as negotiation complexity and volume grow. Advanced contract negotiation solutions allow you to assign clause ownership so that when a clause is interacted with, it's locked for approval by the clause owner. Rules-based clause insertion allows users to automate contract negotiation even further. AI-powered clause comparison and similarity scoring give insight into possible deviations and/or store newly introduced clauses within the library.
Document Versioning & Audit Trails
Version control is critical during negotiations because every change matters. Negotiation strategy is a honed and refined skill, and should not go to waste because of an oversight in version control. Leading contract negotiation software auto-numbers and stores every version of a contract in negotiation. Check-in and check-out functionality can be used for offline edits and to ensure that multiple stakeholders do not overwrite or miss opportunities. The software can provide audit logs of edits, actions, and AI outputs.
How CobbleStone Supports AI-Driven Contract Negotiation
CobbleStone supports the functionality mentioned throughout this blog post and much more. VISDOM® - CobbleStone's proprietary AI with machine learning - supports clause extraction, redlining, sentiment analysis, recommendations, and more. Extraction of key data fields from uploaded documents starts off negotiation strong with insights into metadata, clauses, and counterparties. CobbleStone's RAG-secure platform is built to avoid hallucination and stay grounded in contract management with regard to advanced querying about the system, applicable laws and regulations, and agentic tasks. Theory analysis tools can help identify anomalies, and the chatbot can assist with drafting and reviewing.
CobbleStone also stands out for:
- 30 years in CLM.
- high configurability and user-friendliness.
- end-to-end lifecycle coverage from requests to renewals and everything in between.
- AI being more than just a helper, but rather an autonomous agent.
- commitment to compliance, security, and customer satisfaction.
Want to learn more about these CobbleStone features and countless others? Book a free demo today! It's free - and risk-free.
*Legal Disclaimer: This article is not legal advice. The content of this article is for general informational and educational purposes only. The information on this website may not present the most up-to-date legal information. Readers should contact their attorney for legal advice regarding any particular legal matter.
