First-pass contract review in Word, against your own playbook

What is the business problem, and what does it quietly cost?

Most legal teams are asked to review far more contracts than they can read carefully in the time available. Customer agreements, supplier terms, non-disclosure agreements and data processing addenda arrive daily, often with little notice. Each one is checked against a playbook that lives in a document, in someone's memory or in the heads of a few senior lawyers.

The hidden cost is not only lawyer time. Deals wait for legal sign-off, revenue is recognised later and commercial teams start accepting positions nobody intended to concede. Inconsistent reviews create risk that surfaces months later, when a clause is finally tested.

• Routine clauses absorb senior lawyer hours that could go to complex negotiations.
• Sales and procurement wait days for a first response on standard paper.
• Different reviewers apply the playbook differently, so positions drift over time.

What changes for your legal team?

With Claude, each incoming contract receives a structured first pass before a lawyer opens it. Claude reads the document in Word, identifies the clauses that matter and compares each one with the positions in your playbook. Acceptable wording is confirmed quickly. Deviations are highlighted with a plain-English explanation of what has changed and why it could matter.

Lawyers move from reading every line to reviewing a clear summary of exceptions. They spend their time on negotiation strategy, commercial judgement and the unusual terms that a playbook cannot anticipate. The standard applied to every contract becomes the same standard, every time.

• A summary of the contract at the top, covering parties, term, value and key dates.
• A clause-by-clause table showing: meets playbook, deviates, or missing.
• Suggested redlines placed as tracked changes, ready for lawyer review.

How does Claude connect to the systems you already use?

Claude works inside Microsoft 365, which most legal teams already use. Contracts arrive by email in Outlook and are stored in SharePoint. Claude for Microsoft 365 can open these documents in Word, read the text and place suggested changes as tracked edits that a lawyer can accept or reject, in the same way they would review a colleague's markup.

Your playbook is packaged as a set of Claude Skills: company know-how that Claude follows every time, covering your standard positions, fallback wording and the situations that always go to a senior lawyer. Updating the playbook means updating one set of instructions, not retraining a team. A closely related automation is Handle privacy requests on time, every time. It is built on Claude for legal, from Anthropic.

• Outlook: incoming contracts are identified and routed to the right reviewer.
• SharePoint: the playbook, precedents and previous negotiated versions are referenced where the user has access.
• Word: the first-pass review and suggested redlines appear as tracked changes.

What does a day look like before and after?

Before: a commercial lawyer receives a supplier agreement on Monday morning. They spend the first two hours reading every clause, cross-checking the playbook and drafting a list of concerns to send back. The supplier responds three days later and the cycle starts again.

After: the same agreement arrives and a first-pass review is already waiting in Word. The lawyer sees that payment terms and liability caps deviate from the playbook, with suggested wording attached. They check the reasoning, adjust one fallback position and send a considered markup the same day. Two hours of reading become thirty minutes of decision-making.

How are governance, security and permissions handled?

Claude only sees what each user is already allowed to see. If a lawyer cannot open a confidential negotiation folder in SharePoint, Claude working for that lawyer cannot open it either. Access controls remain exactly where they are today.

Every suggestion is a proposal, not a decision. Named lawyers approve each change, and the record of who reviewed and accepted what is kept in the document history. The design supports the expectation that legal professionals remain responsible for advice and sign-off. It does not replace that responsibility, and nothing here constitutes legal advice.

• Permissions in SharePoint and Microsoft 365 continue to govern access.
• Lawyers accept or reject every tracked change individually.
• Playbook updates are controlled by the legal function, with a clear version history.

How do you measure whether it is working?

Measure what matters to the business. Track the time from receipt of a contract to the first markup sent, the share of routine contracts handled without senior escalation and the number of deviations that reach negotiation unnoticed. Compare these before and after the change over a fixed period.

Teams typically see first-response times fall substantially on standard agreements, with senior lawyer time shifting towards complex matters. Treat these as indicative ranges and confirm them against your own baseline during the audit.

• Time from receipt to first markup, measured for standard and non-standard contracts.
• Proportion of routine contracts closed at first-pass level.
• Number of playbook deviations caught before signature.

How do you get started?

Start with a free automation audit. We review how contracts arrive today, how your playbook is documented and where the largest delays sit. We then recommend a single contract type to pilot, typically one with high volume and well-understood positions, such as non-disclosure agreements or supplier terms.

The pilot builds the playbook Skills, connects Claude to the relevant Outlook and SharePoint locations, and runs alongside your current process so lawyers can compare results. Once the review quality is confirmed, the approach extends to other contract types. For a wider view of how Claude fits into Microsoft 365 across the organisation, see how Claude and Microsoft 365 together lift productivity across the whole organisation.

• Audit: map contract flows, playbook content and priority contract types.
• Pilot: one contract type, run in parallel with existing review.
• Scale: extend to further contract types once quality is proven.