Educate and empower your deal teams for self-service
Internal Guidance is intended to give legal teams a way to guide users through a contract review and negotiation.
ThoughtRiver's pre-configured guidance is written with a business user or junior lawyer in mind. We endeavour to avoid legal jargon and provide simple explanations. The internal guidance is meant to allow these users to self-serve, and at least be able to return a first issues list to the counterparty without needing to consult a senior lawyer.
As such, we take a slightly more firm approach in our pre-configured guidance. For example, requesting clauses to be removed initially, even if it may be acceptable with some amendments. This allows the business user to push back on more complicated legal issues, and then if resisted by the counterparty, the point can be escalated to a senior lawyer at that stage of negotiations.
Writing Internal Guidance
The Internal Guidance field supports multiple lines of text and basic formatting options to help ensure your guidance is easy to read and understand.
At ThoughtRiver, we approach our internal guidance in two parts:
- Key action that needs to be completed
- Educational content to help the user understand why the key action needs to be completed
Key Action
What is the action required of the user (if any) to remediate the contract?
ThoughtRiver writes this content with a color coding to ensure this action is clear and always write it as the first part of the guidance so it's easy for the users to pick-up.
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Green Bold Text |
Only ever "No action required." |
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Orange Bold Text |
Action may be required depending on context so provide guidance to user on what to look out for before agreeing to wording or suggested but non-critical changes For example: “Consider the context and the likelihood that Confidential Information may include oral information before agreeing to include this requirement.” |
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Red Bold Text |
Key actions that must to be taken. For example: “Add in a definition of Confidential Information.” |
Why does it matter?
As the ThoughtRiver Internal Guidance is written with the business user or junior lawyer in mind, we aim to provide education for the user to help them understand why something is or isn’t an issue. For example:
Why does it matter?
In carrying out the purpose of the NDA, the Parties may need to make some limited disclosure of Confidential Information, for example, to advisers (whether legal or financial). Including this term makes it clear that such disclosure is not in breach of the NDA.
Teams with more advanced users may be able to take advantage of a similar approach for educating new employees or team members in your custom playbook.
Enterprise customers can tailor their internal guidance as well as adopt structure and formatting that best suits the needs of their business.