Choosing a review strategy

Explore, Negotiation, High-priority only, or Strict — the review strategy sets how assertive the AI is and how much lands in your redline. Pick the one that matches where you are with the contract.

Updated 17 Jun 2026

The review strategy is the single most important choice in the review setup. It’s the last step — Approach — and it answers one plain question:

Where are you with this contract?

A first-look read of a contract you’ve never seen calls for a different review than a final pre-signature check on a deal you’ve already negotiated twice. The strategy tunes two things to match:

How assertive the review is — how hard it pushes, and what severity bar a finding has to clear to be worth raising.
How much lands in your redline by default — the strategy sets a severity floor for what gets pre-included in the generated redline, before you’ve touched a single finding.

It does not change what the AI checks — that’s the playbook’s job. The same playbook clauses are evaluated every time; the strategy changes the posture the AI takes toward what it finds.

The four strategies

Strategy	Where you are	What it does
Explore	First look — you’ve never seen this contract	Surfaces everything so you understand the document. Nothing is pre-included in the redline; this is a read, not a markup. The default.
Negotiation	You’re going to negotiate	Flags what’s genuinely worth raising, with suggested wording and fallbacks. Pre-includes medium-severity findings and up.
High-priority only	You’re close to signing	Just the things that could genuinely cause problems. Pre-includes high-severity findings and up — the noise is filtered out.
Strict	You need every deviation on record	Flags every departure from the playbook, however small. Pre-includes everything. For compliance passes and regulated templates.

Explore (default)

“First read to understand the contract — surfaces everything, redlines nothing.”

The default, because it’s the least presumptuous: it surfaces everything and pre-includes nothing, so a fresh review never pre-loads your redline with suggestions you haven’t read yet. Use this the first time you open a contract. You’re not marking it up yet — you want the lay of the land: what’s unusual, what’s missing, where the risk sits. Every finding is shown, but nothing is auto-included in the redline, because you’re reading, not editing. When you’ve understood the document, re-run with a strategy that matches your next move.

Explore vs Strict — both surface a lot, so what’s the difference? It’s what happens next. Explore is a read: it shows everything and redlines nothing, so you’re never committed to a markup you haven’t reviewed. Strict is an enforcement pass: it flags every playbook deviation and pre-includes all of it in the redline, for when you need a complete record of how a contract departs from your standard. Explore is for understanding; Strict is for holding the line.

Negotiation

“I’m going to negotiate — flag what’s worth raising, with suggested wording.”

The workhorse. You’re going to go back to the counterparty, and you want a defensible list of asks. Findings come with suggested replacement language and, for the material ones, an escalation ladder: the AI opens with the least-aggressive change that protects your position, gives you a realistic fallback for each, and reserves hard, non-negotiable demands for genuine dealbreakers — so you can open cooperatively and escalate only if you need to. Medium-severity findings and up are pre-included in the redline.

High-priority only

“We’re close to signing — just the things that could genuinely cause problems.”

Late in the deal you don’t want to re-litigate the whole contract — you want to know if there’s anything left that could actually hurt you. This strategy raises the bar: only high-severity findings and up are pre-included in the redline, and the review’s emphasis is on dealbreakers and live exposure, not stylistic or nice-to-have improvements.

Strict

“Compliance pass — flag every deviation from the playbook and redline all of it.”

For compliance reviews, regulated templates, and any situation where you need a complete record of how a contract departs from your standard. Every deviation is flagged and everything is pre-included in the redline. Expect more findings — that’s the point. You’ll typically work through them and switch off the ones you don’t want before generating the redline.

How the strategy shapes the redline

When a review finishes, each finding can end up in or out of the generated redline. Clment decides the starting position for each finding in this order:

Your explicit toggle. If you’ve flipped “Include in redline” on or off for a finding, that always wins.
A redline instruction. If you’ve written replacement wording for a finding, it’s included.
Your verdict. Once you give a verdict, it sets the default — Agree → include, Disagree → exclude.
The strategy’s severity floor. For findings you haven’t touched yet, the strategy decides:

Strategy	Findings pre-included in the redline
Explore	None
Negotiation	Medium severity and above
High-priority only	High severity and above
Strict	All severities

The floor only ever applies to findings you haven’t engaged with. The moment you set a verdict, write a redline instruction, or flip the toggle, your decision takes over. So the strategy gives you a sensible starting point — it never overrides a choice you’ve made.

This is why you can switch from a noisy Strict pass to a focused redline without losing work: set verdicts on the findings that matter, and the low-severity findings you ignored simply stay out.

The posture: a seasoned GC, not an over-eager junior

A frequent and fair worry about AI contract review is that it’s overzealous — that it invents problems, cites authority it can’t back up, hardens its stance when you ask it to “be tough”, and buries the real issues under a pile of trivia. Clment reviews are built to behave like a seasoned general counsel instead, and this posture holds on every strategy:

Stay grounded. The AI cites only what the contract or your playbook actually supports. It won’t invoke statutes, regulations, cases, or standards it can’t tie back to the document or the playbook. If it thinks something external applies but can’t ground it from what it was given, it marks the finding needs verification and says so — rather than asserting unverifiable authority as fact. (See the source badges in Understanding finding verdicts.)
Hold a reasoned line. The AI won’t inflate severity or harden its position just because your instructions are framed combatively — and it won’t drop or soften a genuine issue because someone asserts the opposite without a substantive reason. It changes its assessment only on the merits.
Be measured, not maximal. It prefers the least-aggressive position that protects you, and reserves critical severity for genuine dealbreakers.

The strategy you pick changes how much the AI surfaces and redlines — but it never licenses the AI to overreach. Even Strict flags small deviations without inflating what they mean.

Add an executive summary

Below the strategy picker is an Add an executive summary toggle. It’s independent of the strategy: tick it on any review and you’ll get a short, plain-English overview written for a non-lawyer audience — alongside the detailed findings, not instead of them. Useful when the review is going to a deal owner, a founder, or a colleague who needs the gist without reading every finding.

Which should I pick?

Never seen it before? → Explore. The default — understand it, then re-run.
Going back to the other side? → Negotiation. The right call once you know the contract and you’re going to push back.
Final check before signature? → High-priority only. Surface what could still hurt you, skip the noise.
Compliance / regulated template / need a full record? → Strict.

You can re-run a review with a different strategy as many times as you like — re-running is cheap relative to getting the posture wrong, and a common workflow is Explore once, then Negotiation.

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