Ironclad AI Playbooks Overview

This article will provide you with a conceptual overview of Ironclad Playbooks. If you want to learn how to use Ironclad Playbooks, refer to Use Ironclad AI Playbooks.

What are Ironclad AI Playbooks?

Ironclad Playbooks offer the following functionality:

• Assisted Contract Reviews: Playbooks, powered by Ironclad AI, automatically detect paragraphs, rich text, and lists in the document, and flag areas of the document that require the contract reviewer to manually review based on your configuration.
• Identify Clauses: You no longer need to search across a 40-page document to review a relevant clause or term in question. Using Playbooks, Ironclad helps your team prioritize which redlines to make.
• Pre-Approved Terms (Preferred and Fallback Options): Administrators can provide reviewers with directions and instructions on preferred and fall back positions in Playbooks. Playbooks allow teams to quickly swap a detected clause with preferred or fallback language with a click of a button.
• Clause Approvers: Ironclad can flag a specific clause as a non-standard term and request to notify the relevant stakeholders of the term. Did the counterparty request an exception for payment terms? You can configure the Playbooks to notify the Finance team to approve the exception. This removes the need for legal teams to resolve each issue found in a contract.
• Playbook Permissions and Controls: Administrators can configure Ironclad users and groups to permit or restrict which users can view, create, and modify Playbooks. This gives administrators more control over how and when to use Playbooks to support contract reviews. Playbook permissions are found on the Groups page under ‘Users & Groups’.
• Advanced Contract Insights in the Repository: The clauses detected by AI Playbooks are stored in the Repository so you can evaluate potential risks and determine how each clause or negotiated term impacts execution speed or liability.

How Do Ironclad AI Playbooks Work?

Your Ironclad Playbook is linked to a Workflow Designer template, allowing you to attach a Playbook, composed of a set of plays, to a single workflow. Each AI Playbook consists of a series of plays. You can customize the AI Playbook in each Workflow Designer template based on your business needs.

In the above screenshot, you'll see three playbooks listed under the Playbooks section in Workflow Designer.

Every play in AI Playbooks is tied to a clause. You can assign logic to each play and as a result, when workflows are initiated, AI Playbooks use AI to execute the logic.

Each play sequences its events as follows:

Position Matching

Based on the preferred and fallback positions you've entered, AI will first search for those exact positions in the document.

You can set your preferred positions in the Pre-Approved section of the play.

If there's a match, you'll see that a preferred position has been detected and deemed acceptable.

AI Clause Type (Optional)

If there are no preferred positions matches from the last step, then the selected AI Clause will detect the clause in the document. You can learn more about how AI Clauses and AI Custom Clauses detect clauses in the AI Clauses and AI Custom Clauses Overview.

When a play is linked to an AI Clause type, it will be displayed with a sparkle icon:

If you leave this dropdown blank and no matching position was found in Step 1, then AI Playbooks will inform the user that it did not detect the clause.

Trigger Rules

Once the clause is detected in the document (either through Position Matching or AI Clause Type), Playbooks will display the relevant information to the user based on the trigger rules. The information displayed depends on what's input in the play: the play name, description, and all positions. To learn more about trigger rules, refer to Create Ironclad AI Playbooks in Workflow Designer.

Why Should I Use Ironclad Playbooks?

Before Ironclad Playbooks, you had to read and analyze contracts line-by-line and use extensive legal and financial resources to review and negotiate high-volume, standard business contracts like NDAs, MSAs, DPAs, vendor and software agreements.

With Ironclad Playbooks, important clauses in business agreements are automatically detected, and you can provide a list of pre-approved terms to ensure your team is reviewing and negotiating contracts consistently while lowering the risk to the business. Ironclad Playbooks helps you never miss a required clause or term and also flags when restructured terms are included in your contract. Ironclad can then automatically flag non-standard terms for a contract reviewer and notify the appropriate functional stakeholder whether that is Legal, Finance, Security, or a Sales Lead to approve the use of that term. All of this functionality gives you unparalleled visibility into business liabilities and helps you identify operational process improvements to help your team reach mutual agreement faster in contract negotiations.

We recommend Playbooks if you frequently review contracts. We’ve heard feedback from the following teams that they are seeing immediate benefits from using Playbooks in their business contract reviews:

• Legal and Legal Ops
• Deal Desks
• Revenue Operations
• Procurement