Purpose
The goal of this article is to help you get up to speed with LegalOn's AI-powered First-Party Playbooks, launched in April 2025.
We will explore the following topics:
1. User benefits of First-Party Playbooks
We built First-Party Playbooks to help you review your first-party templates. With First-Party Playbooks, you can focus on what matters most: redlines from the counterparty.
When you’re negotiating based on your own templates, First-Party Playbooks streamline the process by drawing attention only to changes and deviations. This reduces noise, speeds up analysis, and enables you to assess risk and push back on edits more effectively. By simplifying the review process, First-Party Playbooks help you negotiate with greater consistency, confidence, and efficiency.
2. The structure of a first-party playbook in LegalOn
A first-party playbook contains a few components:
Article Title;
Issue Title;
Negotiation Framework (including Fallback Position and Non-Negotiable Position); and
Supplementary Information (including Escalations or Approvals, and Explanatory Comments).
How first-party playbooks are displayed on the Configuration page:
Now, let's take a look at how each of these components plays a role in the contract review process:
Text Field | Purpose | Read by AI? | Example |
Article Title | Specific article or general topic under which related issues are organized. | Yes | “Limitation of Liability” |
Issue Title | Specific issue requiring review within the Article. | Yes | “Aggregate Liability Cap” |
Fallback Position | Acceptable clause or revision if preferred language is not agreed to. | Yes | “Cap must not exceed the amount paid in the last twelve months” or “OK to accept language such as 'liability limited to the total fees paid under this Agreement'” |
Non-Negotiable Position | Critical terms that are not acceptable or cannot be altered. | Yes | “Must include an aggregate liability cap” or “Cannot accept language such as ‘Liability shall be unlimited’” |
Supplementary information (i.e., Escalations or Approvals, Explanatory Comments) | Additional information that might be helpful to you and your team while reviewing the contract. | No | You might want to add an explanatory comment to explain why a counterparty’s redlines are unacceptable. |
3. How to configure First-Party Playbook alerts?
Currently, users can only configure Playbooks via LegalOn's web application.
Below are the steps for adding a First-Party Playbook alert:
Step 1: click “First-Party Playbooks” under “My Playbooks (new)”
Step 2: click “+ Add Playbook” to create a first-party playbook
Step 3: fill out Playbook name and click “Add”
Step 4: click “Add Playbook alert” to add legal issues that matter to your organization
Step 5: enter supplementary information (optional)
Step 6: save Playbook alert
You may also copy or move a Playbook alert from one to another Playbook from the configuration page.
4. Reviewing redlined contracts with First-Party Playbooks (web app)
Currently, the following review options are available to you in LegalOn:
review with My Playbooks - First-Party Playbooks only;
review with My Playbooks - Third-Party Playbooks only;
review with LegalOn's off-the-shelf playbooks only;
review with both My Playbooks and LegalOn's playbooks.
Below are the steps for reviewing contracts with First-Party Playbooks (web app):
Step 0: Upload a redlined contract to the contract dashboard
Step 1: From the Preview screen, deselect "LegalOn Alerts" and select "First-Party Playbooks" under "My Playbooks"
Step 2: Select the relevant first-party playbook(s) from “My Playbooks” dropdown in the Review panel
Step 3: Click “Start review”
Step 4: LegalOn directs you to the Editor page, where your review results are displayed
When a First-Party Playbook alert is expanded, you'll see your playbook information (i.e., inputs from the Configuration page), source redline from the counterparty, an AI-generated explanation, along with a playbook alert status showing one of the following options:
Meets fallback: The redline complies with acceptable fallback position.
Violates non-negotiables: The redline violates a non‑negotiable requirement and cannot be accepted.
Review required: The redline does not explicitly violate the non-negotiable position, but introduces ambiguity or requires human judgment.
* Empty text fields from “Supplementary Information” section will be hidden by default.
💡 Pro Tip:
Expressing your fallback position and non-negotiable position in clear, explicit, and self-contained language will help AI assign the right status to your playbook alerts. Avoid vague or implied references.
Fallback positions should describe acceptable alternatives in concrete terms. For example:
✅ “OK to accept language such as ‘liability limited to the total fees paid under this Agreement’”
❌ “Accept if it’s reasonable”
Non-negotiable positions should define firm boundaries using direct phrasing. For example:
✅ “Must include an aggregate liability cap”
✅ “Cannot accept language such as ‘Liability shall be unlimited’”
❌ “Watch out for overly broad terms”
Clarity helps the AI identify redlines, match them accurately to your playbook guidance, and reduce misclassification.
5. Known limitations
First-Party Playbooks are currently optimized for reviewing a single round of redlines on users’ first-party templates.
At this stage, LegalOn’s AI does NOT identify which party made which changes, so accuracy may decrease in contracts with multiple rounds of edits or mixed authorship. For best results, encourage users to leverage First-Party Playbooks for first-pass reviews of counterparty markups on clean first-party paper.
Users may only add one fallback position and one non-negotiable position in the Configuration page.
We currently have one text field for fallback position and non-negotiable position in the Configuration page to simplify the UI. Based on usage and user feedback, we’re open to adding more fields for each position.Playbook alert results are only displayed on the Editor screen (NOT the Review screen).
When a user clicks on “start review,” LegalOn will take them directly to the Editor page. This is due to the limitation that redlined text cannot be displayed on the Review page.
Not all redlines would trigger an alert.
Redlines that would trigger an alert in V3 | Redlines that would NOT trigger an alert in V3 |
Substantive redlines (e.g., redlines that address legal concepts / issues) | Non-substantive redlines (e.g., formatting changes, typo clean-ups) |
Redlines that can be matched up with first-party playbooks | Redlines that can NOT be matched up with any first-party playbooks |
5. File format compatibility
.doc files are unsupported given that this file type is incompatible with Editor. We’re considering short-term solutions such as disabling the first-party playbook review option when a .doc file is uploaded.
6. “Quick Restore” doesn’t work on first-party playbook results
When clicking on “Quick Restore”, users will only be able to see cached results from LegalOn Alerts currently (should they have selected LO alerts in the first place).
We will fix this over time but consider this a non-blocker for the upcoming release.
7. Simple v.s. complex redlines
In this release of My Playbooks V3, our focus is intentionally scoped to structurally simple and select compound contract redlines.
These include single word replacements, phrase substitutions, and discrete clause edits that are contextually contained and easier for the AI to interpret with high confidence.
More complex edits—such as multiple redlines within the same sentence addressing the same legal issue or conflicting redlines across different rounds—are currently not addressed. This approach helps us ensure more reliable performance while laying the foundation to support more advanced edge cases in future iterations.