Robert Ambrogi Blog
SimpleDocs today announced the launch of what it is calling its Contract Intelligence Layer, an advanced benchmarking feature that integrates a law department’s internal policies, historical contract precedent and verified market standards directly inside the Microsoft Word add-in where lawyers are already doing their work.
The launch builds on the company’s September 2025 acquisition of Law Insider, a database platform founded more than 15 years ago that has assembled what is claimed to be the world’s largest publicly referenceable collection of executed contracts and clauses.
At its core, the Contract Intelligence Layer unifies three sources of information that legal teams have historically had to piece together from scattered sources:
- Policy data: An organization’s formally documented positions, including playbook language, fallback positions and escalation thresholds. SimpleDocs has offered customizable playbooks for some time, and they remain central to the platform.
- Market standards data: This is the piece that is powered by Law Insider’s database of millions of actual, executed agreements spanning more than 40 languages and organized across industries, jurisdictions, deal sizes and time periods.
- Precedent data: This is the part that is new as of today and that completes the three-legged stool of SimpleDocs Contract Intelligence Layer.
CEO Preston Clark, who demonstrated it for me in an exclusive preview ahead of the launch, called this the most exciting new capability.
“Lawyers don’t need more AI recommendations,” Clark told me. “They need data-informed decisions. The Contract Intelligence Layer gives teams the context behind every negotiation, so they can make decisions faster and with the data they need to defend it.”
Precedent-Based Benchmarking
The new precedent review feature tackles a problem that anyone who has worked in a busy legal department will instantly recognize: the reliance on tribal knowledge when reviewing redlines from a counterparty.
“Private equity talks about this all the time,” Clark said during our conversation. “They’re like, ‘Have we accepted this before?’ And some lawyer says, ‘I think we have. So I think we’re good.’ And it’s always a lot of like tribal knowledge. Your boss will say, ‘Yeah, I think we have. We’re good on that.'”
The new feature replaces that guesswork with verifiable data. Working inside the Microsoft Word add-in, a lawyer reviewing an inbound redline can now click into SimpleDocs’ precedent tool, filter by agreement type and counterparty, and run a comparison against the organization’s repository of past executed agreements.
The system then surfaces, issue by issue, whether each flagged change has been rarely accepted, sometimes accepted or commonly accepted, with direct links to the specific documents where those decisions were made.
In the demo, Clark showed how a lawyer could click on a flagged issue — say, a counterparty’s push to add non-sale and non-re-identification commitments — and see that the organization had accepted similar language on 31 prior occasions. From there, a single click opens the actual underlying documents for review, with an AI layer available to answer questions about specific terms within those agreements.
The system can also show the reverse — instances where the same type of change was not accepted, helping lawyers understand the full picture before deciding whether to accept or push back.
“What I love about this launch is it’s marrying together a product we already had — our AI repository — and creating this precedent library use case for it,” Clark said. “If you want to see the precedent and go all the way into the document, you can do that with a couple of clicks.”
Intelligence Driven By Context
While there is no shortage of AI contract tools on the market — including even the recent release from Claude of a contract review tool — SimpleDocs emphasizes that, while many of these tools have made it easier to analyze contracts and generate redlines, they lack the data required to make informed contextual negotiation and drafting decisions.
That is the gap SimpleDocs is aiming to fill with its Contract Intelligence Layer. While AI can answer the question, “Given these instructions, what should I do,” the harder question to answer for in-house lawyers is what something means within the context of their company’s policies and past decisions, as well as comparable deals in the market.
That ability to benchmark against real data and actual precedent is critical to distinguishing SimpleDocs from its competitors, Clark says.
“They might be perfectly fine,” he said, “but I can’t actually verify the recommendations that their tool is making.”
Precedent from Multiple Sources
For the new precedent data specifically, SimpleDocs can draw from multiple sources. SimpleDocs natively acts as an AI repository for many of its enterprise customers, storing and indexing executed agreements that can then feed into the precedent benchmarking engine.
But for organizations with documents already living in a document management system or CLM, the platform offers integrations with SharePoint and other DMS and e-signature platforms, including DocuSign.
“We don’t have to become your repository in order to use this functionality,” Clark explained. “We can integrate with just about any CLM, any DMS, any place where those documents live.” For organizations that don’t have a well-organized repository at all, SimpleDocs can also serve as that infrastructure.
Although not yet live, Clark said users will soon be able to upload precedent documents directly from inside the Microsoft Word add-in — a feature that will let smaller teams or individual users quickly establish a working precedent library without needing a formal repository integration in place.
Availability and Pricing
While both policy data and market standards data were already available within SimpleDocs, the full Contract Intelligence Layer, including precedent data, is available today in limited beta, with existing SimpleAI Pro customers getting first access.
Clark said the company wants to onboard those customers carefully, before opening broader waitlist access, which he indicated would happen before the end of the month.
The SimpleAI Pro package bundles the Contract Intelligence Layer — including precedent-based benchmarking, custom playbooks with legal engineering support, and the expanding Law Insider market standards integration — alongside the platform’s core drafting, redlining, and review capabilities.
A less data-intensive basic plan will continue to be available at a lower monthly subscription price.
To request access, users can join the waitlist at simpledocs.com/waitlist.