Barnes & Thornburg’s Legal Project Management Team supported a fast-moving change of control acquisition involving a health system. As part of the transaction, the team needed an efficient way to organize and extract key information from hundreds of contracts to accelerate the contract review
process.

Challenge

Initial contract review was time-consuming and difficult to coordinate among team members. The client was open to the use of AI, but only if the team could ensure accuracy of the results. Prior attempts at AI-assisted contract review had not been successful because the tools did not pull the information the lawyers needed, which created extra review work instead of reducing it.

Approach

The Legal Project Management Team worked with the attorneys to build an AI-powered contract review table that cited critical terms, enabling faster and more structured analysis. The team first shaped the format of the output, then used review tables from prior deals — created without AI — to refine the results and align the layout with what the attorneys would ordinarily create manually. The process also allowed the lead reviewer to assign specific rows to team members for review and validation, incorporated attorney input on the necessary table columns based on prior review projects, and included training on how to refine prompts in AI tools to improve results.

Impact

The AI-assisted contract review table improved the speed and structure of contract analysis across hundreds of agreements. The process worked well enough that the team plans to replicate the same structure and workflow for separate deals. The work was built into the client’s existing legal engagement and billed hourly, while also equipping the attorneys to use the technology more independently in future matters. More broadly, the engagement highlights the Legal Project Management Team as a key firm resource, that can support attorneys on large, complex, or time-intensive matters by using AI tools in a practical and efficient way.