An AI legal assistant that reads contracts in minutes, not hours.
LegalIQ gives small legal teams and in-house counsel the ability to review contracts at a fraction of the cost of outside counsel. We built the AI review engine, the document management system, and the web SaaS — from zero to launch in 14 weeks.
Small businesses and startups routinely sign contracts they haven't properly reviewed — because outside counsel costs $400-600/hr and in-house teams are overwhelmed.
Small businesses and startups routinely sign contracts they haven't properly reviewed — because outside counsel costs $400-600/hr and in-house teams are overwhelmed. LegalIQ's founding team had witnessed first-hand how bad contract terms could destroy a company's finances or IP position.
The AI had to go beyond simple keyword extraction. It needed to flag risk levels (low/medium/high), explain what each clause meant in plain English, compare against standard market terms, and let users annotate and negotiate inline.
The hardest technical constraint: accuracy. A missed clause in a contract is not a UX problem — it's a legal and reputational risk. We committed to 90%+ clause detection accuracy before launch.
Legal clarity for non-lawyers.
We shadowed eight in-house lawyers and four startup founders over three weeks. Key insight: the real pain isn't reading the contract — it's knowing what to look for. The UI had to surface risk before users even knew what questions to ask.
AI review in under 90 seconds.
The web app is Next.js 14. Contracts upload via PDF/DOCX, get processed through a dual-model pipeline (clause extraction + risk classification), and return structured results in under 90 seconds for a standard NDA. Longer contracts scale linearly — a 100-page agreement takes under 8 minutes.
What ships in the product.
Instant clause extraction
Uploads PDF or DOCX. Extracts and categorises every clause in under 90 seconds with risk level (low/medium/high).
Plain English summaries
Every clause gets a one-sentence summary in plain English — written for the business owner, not the lawyer.
Market comparison
Flags clauses that deviate from standard market terms in the contract's jurisdiction and industry.
Risk heatmap
Visual overlay on the original contract highlights high-risk clauses in red, medium in amber, standard in green.
Negotiation suggestions
For every flagged clause, the AI proposes alternative language the other party is likely to accept.
Inline annotation
Comment, redline, and resolve clauses directly in the web app. Shared annotation threads for team review.
Playbook builder
Companies define their standard positions on common clauses — LegalIQ auto-flags any contract that deviates.
Audit trail
Every review, annotation, and decision is time-stamped and logged for compliance records.
Multi-user workspaces
Law firms and in-house teams manage client matters in separate workspaces with role-based access control.
Production-grade from week one.
We chose the boring, battle-tested options where it mattered and innovated where it gave the product a real edge.
We reviewed 40 contracts last quarter. Before LegalIQ, that would have been $60,000 in outside counsel. It cost us $800.
What it took.
- Accuracy as a non-negotiable. We built a benchmark test suite of 200 annotated contracts reviewed by human lawyers. The dual-model pipeline (extract then classify) outperformed single-model approaches by 8% on clause recall.
- Handling contract complexity at scale. 100-page agreements with nested cross-references broke naive extraction. We built a document graph that resolves defined terms and clause references before analysis — reducing hallucination by 40%.
- Jurisdiction-aware risk scoring. A clause that's high-risk in California may be standard in England. We built a jurisdiction selector with a market-terms database covering US, UK, EU, and AUS.
- Enterprise security requirements. Enterprise buyers needed SOC 2 Type II compliance. We architected for it from day one — audit logging, data residency, and encryption in transit and at rest — and passed the audit at month 6.
What changed.
A walk through the product.
Key screens, detailed.
A closer look at the core user flows built for this product.
Building something like LegalIQ?
LegalIQ gives small legal teams and in-house counsel the ability to review contracts at a fraction of the cost of outside counsel. Send us a brief and we'll scope it within 24 hours.