The Legal AI 'Step-In Rights' Blind Spot: Why Your Contract Review Tool Is Telling You Half the Story
The clause is there. The AI found it. Your summary report shows a green tick next to "step-in rights identified." You move on.
Latest Analysis
That's the problem.
AI contract review tools have become genuinely useful for high-volume clause detection. Products like Thomson Reuters CoCounsel Legal, Luminance, and Spellbook have demonstrated real value in surfacing provisions lawyers might otherwise miss across large document sets. But there is a specific, repeatable failure mode that practitioners in outsourcing and infrastructure work are beginning to encounter, and it is serious enough to warrant a direct conversation about where AI review ends and legal judgment must begin.
The failure mode is this: AI tools reliably identify that a step-in rights clause exists. They consistently fail to assess whether the performance thresholds that trigger it are defined with enough precision to actually be exercised.
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