Producing issues lists and redlines in minutes, not hours
Producing issues lists and redlines quickly is one of the most consistent pressure points for transactional deal teams. The counterparty's draft arrives on a Friday afternoon. The client wants a response by Monday. Someone needs to turn around a structured analysis of the issues and a marked-up version of the document over the weekend.
Why the process takes as long as it does
Building an issues list from a counterparty draft involves reading the whole document, identifying every clause that departs from the firm's preferred position, prioritising the issues by commercial significance and then drafting proposed language for each point. On a fifty-page agreement, that is a multi-hour exercise even for an experienced associate. On a share purchase agreement with schedules, it can consume most of a day.
The redline that accompanies the issues list adds more time. Each tracked change needs to reflect the firm's actual preferred position, not just a generic alternative, and needs to be consistent with positions taken elsewhere in the document on related points.
What faster looks like
AI assistance accelerates the initial analysis by identifying departures from the firm's standard positions automatically, drawing on the precedent base rather than requiring the lawyer to hold all the relevant standards in their head while reading. The issues list that results still requires the lawyer's judgment on prioritisation and commercial context, but the first pass of identifying and cataloguing departures is substantially quicker.
The redline benefits from the same precedent grounding. Rather than drafting alternative language from scratch, the lawyer reviews suggested positions drawn from clauses the firm has used and agreed in similar transactions. The starting point is the firm's actual position, not a generic alternative.
The quality question
Speed only helps if the output is reliable. The risk with AI assistance on issues lists is that the system misses something the lawyer would have caught. This is materially reduced when the AI is operating from a specific, curated precedent base rather than from general legal knowledge. The gaps that emerge from generic drafting suggestions are much wider than those that emerge from suggestions grounded in documents the firm has already reviewed and approved.
The lawyer's review remains essential. But reviewing a well-grounded draft issues list is significantly faster than producing one from scratch. To see what faster turnaround on counterparty documents looks like in practice, book a demo and we can demonstrate with a live document.