This article goes over Contract Family Agent, an Early Access Program (EAP) feature that automatically organizes related contracts into parent-child hierarchies, such as MSAs, SOWs, and amendments, so teams can understand vendor or customer relationships more clearly.
Use Case
Use the Contract Family Agent when related agreements are difficult to connect manually and you need a clearer view of the full commercial relationship behind a customer or vendor record. For example, if you have a master agreement plus multiple SOWs and amendments for the same relationship, Contract Family Agent can help organize those agreements into one structured family view.
Permissions
| Features |
Entities, Contract Families |
| Permissions |
Legal Ops, Admins |
Ironclad Early Access Program: This feature is in Early Access and may change before it is generally available. If you're interested in this feature, please reach out to your Ironclad representative or Support to see if you're eligible for EAP access.
Release: One or more of the following features and functionalities will go live on July 23, 2026. To learn more about what's included in our July release, refer to What's New in Ironclad: July 2026.
What's the Contract Family Agent?
The Contract Family Agent is an AI-powered feature for Contract Families. It analyzes contracts associated with an entity and organizes them into a parent, child, and amendment hierarchy to create a structured family view.
You can think of the Contract Family Agent as sitting on top of the existing Contract Families functionality:
- Contract Families is the feature for viewing and managing related contracts. Learn more about Contract Families in Ironclad.
- Contract Family Agent creates and helps organize those relationships automatically, in place of manual tagging and linking.
The entity record must exist in Ironclad before running the agent, but contracts don't need to be pre-tagged with the entity.
How Contract Family Relationships are Identified
The agent evaluates contract content and supporting metadata:
- Contract Language. The agent reads the agreement text for references to a governing agreement. For example, language indicating that an SOW, Order Form, or amendment is governed by or modifies a specific MSA.
- Parties/Counterparty Resolution. Where later sections of a contract use generic labels such as Company, Customer, or Vendor, the agent uses the named parties in the agreement text to determine the counterparty. The agent derives counterparty identity from the document where possible, rather than relying on the counterparty metadata field alone.
- Dates and Amendment Language. Amendment preambles typically name the parties and reference the original agreement by type and date. The agent uses these cues to connect an amendment to the correct parent record.
The end result is placing each record into the correct Contract Family relationship
When multiple parent candidates exist, the agent uses these signals to attach an SOW or amendment to the most likely governing agreement. Results that are not clear-cut are routed to the review queue rather than auto-linked.
Contract Family Agent: Verification Queue
When the Contract Family Agent isn't confident enough to auto-resolve a case, it'll redirect it into a review queue to flag for human review. The queue surfaces at least two types of cases for review:
- Flagged contracts where the agent found a possible family relationship but needs a person to confirm it.
- Abandoned contracts that appear relevant to the entity but couldn't be confidently placed in the tree.
You can access the queue inside the Entities workspace as a dedicated review area tied to the selected entity.
To review, click the More options icon (vertical ellipsis) to the right of any contract in the Contract Family. There are four review actions you can take:
| Action | Description |
| Confirm location | Use this when the contract is flagged / low confidence, but the agent’s proposed spot in the family is actually correct. |
| Move | Use this when the contract belongs in the family, but under a different parent than the agent chose. |
| Add child | Use this when the current contract should remain where it is, but you need to attach another contract beneath it. |
| Remove from entity | Use this when the contract should not be part of the current entity’s contract set for this family run. |
Using the Contract Family Agent
To run the Contract Family Agent:
- In the Entities workspace, open the detail page for the entity you want to organize.
- In the top right, click Update contract family.
-
Choose whether you'd like to respect the current family tree and only add net-new contracts or update the entire family tree.
- Click Move.
After a run, the entity's Contracts view displays the proposed family as a tree, with a preview of each relationship.
High-confidence relationships are organized automatically. Low-confidence results are sent to the verification queue, and need to be reviewed.
After a family is created, the Contract Family pill appears on Dashboard and Workflow pages and links into the hierarchy from those views.
Known Limitations
These are limitations in the current release (EAP), and may be resolved by the time it's generally available.
| Limitation |
|---|
| The Contract Family Agent supports vendor relationships only. |
| Only one relationship type per entity is allowed per run. |
| Child entities are not included automatically. Run the agent separately on each child entity. |
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