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Manage Playbooks

AI-Powered contract review using your internal rules

Written by Alina
Updated yesterday

This article should answer:


What are Playbooks

Playbooks let you review legal documents using AI combined with your organisation’s own review rules.

Instead of relying only on general AI knowledge, Playbooks apply your internal rules to a document. They analyse clauses and paragraphs, check them against your requirements, and return structured feedback with references to the relevant sections.

The result: faster reviews that reflect how your legal team actually works.

Why not rely on AI alone?

Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT are trained on publicly available information. While they understand legal language well, they do not know:

  • Your internal policies

  • Your deal-specific context

  • Your unwritten team practices

Playbooks solve this by defining your rules and (optionally) asking deal-specific questions before the review. This ensures the AI applies your standards - not generic assumptions.


✅When to use them

  • Ensure contracts comply with internal policies

  • Standardise review practices across a team

  • Speed up repetitive or structured contract reviews

  • Support legal professionals with an AI-assisted first assessment

⚠️ When not to use them

  • If the review is delegated to non-legal users who cannot assess the output

  • For highly sensitive or high-risk matters without legal supervision

  • If your organisation prefers fully manual reviews

For manual, non-AI reviews, use Checklists instead.

Playbooks are primarily designed for DOCX contracts, but can also be used for other Word documents (e.g. memos, letters). PDFs should be converted to Word before review.


Creating a Playbook

You can create Playbooks in several ways:

1. Start from scratch

Create a blank category and add rules manually.

2. Extract rules from selected text

Use AI to turn existing text (e.g. internal playbooks or client guidelines) into rules. Simply select text in a document and let LawVu Draft generate a first version.

3. Use pre-made templates

LawVu Draft provides ready-made playbook samples (Word documents). These are a practical starting point, especially if your team doesn’t already have structured rules.

These templates are intentionally imperfect - they may include too many or even conflicting rules. The goal is to review them internally, remove what’s not relevant, and refine what remains.

4. Extract rules from current document

This method does not use GenAI, so formatting must be followed strictly.

For best results, format your Word document as follows:

  • Use Title style for the document title

  • Use Heading 1 for groups

  • Use Heading 2 for individual rules

  • Keep each rule to one paragraph

  • Start rules with a short bold title

If your document wasn’t based on a LawVu Draft sample (see previous option), you can still import it if it uses proper outline levels (e.g. Heading styles). Higher levels become groups; the lowest level becomes individual requirements. To preserve ordering, consider adding numbering (e.g. 01, 02, 03).


To learn more about how to build playbooks efficiently, check out this article: Strategy for deploying Playbooks


Adding rules and elements

Within a category, you can add different types of elements:

  • Group: Lets you organise elements into a hierarchy (groups, sub-groups, etc.). This is for human readability only - the LLM does not use it.

  • Requirement: The core element. It defines a rule, and can optionally include conditions and actions.

  • Information extraction: Lets the LLM pull specific information from a document (e.g. names, amounts) without judging it.

  • Literal text match: Checks whether specific wording must be present (or absent) in the document.

  • Condition: Defines when a requirement applies. It can include questions for the user, and the answers are used to decide if the rule is relevant.

  • Insight: Provides background context to help the LLM better understand your content.

  • Question: Collects user input to support rule evaluation


Adding a Requirement

A requirement defines what should be checked in a document.

  • Title: A short label describing the rule (e.g. “Liability must be capped”). Keep it concise, as it appears in the hierarchy.

  • Contents: Details explaining what you expect (e.g. what should be included in a clause). If omitted, the Title is used instead to perform the review.

You can also add extra elements via the + Augment button:

  • Context: Internal guidance for colleagues (e.g. links, contacts, practical tips). This is not shared with the LLM.

  • Conditions: Define when the requirement applies. You can combine multiple conditions (e.g. all, any, or none must be met).

  • Actions: Define what should happen after reviewing.

  • Questions: Collects user input to support rule evaluation.

  • Refine Contents: Allows the user to add alternative positions to the requirements.


Augmentations within a Requirement

As described above, you can use the +Augment button to add various elements to your Requirement. Below, we describe these in more detail:

Context

Internal guidance and support for colleagues, including relevant links, key contacts, and practical tips for carrying out tasks effectively. This information is intended strictly for internal use and is not shared with or processed by the LLM.

Conditions

Specify the conditions under which the requirement applies. Multiple conditions can be combined, allowing you to define whether all, any, or none of them must be met for the requirement to take effect.

Actions

Clearly define the actions or outcomes that should follow the review process, specifying what needs to happen once the reviewing has been completed.

Insert Clause

Allows you to link a clause from the Quality Library to the requirement. After reviewing, you can easily insert this clause into the active document or use it to compare (and even perform a smart merge) with the document’s current clause.

Rewrite selected text

Allows you to rewrite the selected text from the active document after reviewing it, based on a predefined prompt or instruction.

It is important to note that this Action is not required to have LawVu Draft rewrite text based on the r-Requirement. This Action is intended to provide additional instructions to the LLM.

In other words, if the Requirement itself contains enough information to rewrite the relevant clause, this Action is not necessary.

Add comment to selected text

Insert a comment into the document using predefined content, ensuring consistency and standardization in the information that is added.

Questions

Gathers and captures user input to support the evaluation of rules, ensuring that the necessary information is available to assess whether specific conditions or criteria are met.

Refine Contents

Lets you add alternative positions to a requirement.

You can define layers such as Mostly met, Partially met, Not met, or Irrelevant to capture flexibility.

Multiple layers can be applied to a single requirement, reflecting different acceptable outcomes.

The Irrelevant layer marks a requirement as not applicable in specific situations.

During review, all layers are considered, showing which aspects are fully, mostly, partially, or not met.

This allows for nuanced evaluation rather than a simple yes/no outcome.

It helps capture internal variations and ensures that alternative positions are properly accounted for.


Literal Text Match

This feature checks for exact text, using traditional (non-LLM) matching.

Use it when wording must be precise (e.g. mandatory legal clauses). Keep in mind:

  • Small differences (even one character) can cause failure

  • PDFs may introduce errors during conversion

  • Matching works best on short, single paragraphs

For multiple clauses, create separate rules rather than one long match.


Adding a Condition

Controls when a requirement should apply - or be ignored - by the LLM.

You could describe conditions in the Requirement itself, but using a separate Condition is recommended. It keeps things clearer and lets you add questions for the user (e.g. deal size), so the LLM can take deal-specific context into account.

When creating a condition:

  • Title: A short description (e.g. “Contract value above €5,000”)

  • Contents: Extra details (if empty, only the Title is used)


Insights

Provides background information to help the LLM understand your content.

Use Insights to explain internal concepts or context that apply across multiple requirements, instead of repeating the same explanation each time.

An Insight includes:

  • Title: A short description

  • Contents: Extra details (if omitted, only the Title is used)


Questions

Let you collect input from the user to help decide whether a requirement applies.

The answers are passed to the LLM, so it can take deal-specific information into account - especially when that information isn’t in the document (e.g. deal value).

You can add multiple questions, using different formats (e.g. yes/no, text, number, date, duration, currency).


Review Sets

Let you choose which rules apply to a specific type of deal.

Once your category contains multiple rules, you can group them into review sets.

Review sets allow you to:

  • Select which rules apply in a given scenario

  • Pre-fill answers to condition questions

This is useful when not all rules apply to every deal. For example, a low-value contract may require fewer checks than a high-risk, high-value agreement.

If no review set is used, all rules in the category are applied by default.


General Guidelines

Keep content concise

LLMs work best with clear, focused instructions. Avoid long or complex rules—think of the LLM like a junior colleague: clear key points are more effective than too much detail.

What to include

Focus on information the LLM may not know (e.g. internal policies, recent developments, niche areas). You can usually skip widely known or standard legal concepts unless precision is important.

Important: Playbooks support review

AI-based review is still evolving. Playbooks should be used as a structured first-pass to help you:

  • Identify potential issues

  • Spot missing elements

  • Highlight clauses that need attention

Do not rely on the output alone—final legal judgement remains the responsibility of a qualified professional. Results will continue to improve as AI evolves.

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