Sullivan & Cromwell brings legal expertise into agreement review

In collaboration with OpenAI, law firm Sullivan & Cromwell has developed Agreement Analyzer, an AI-powered tool designed to assist lawyers in reviewing draft agreements. Initially created as a single-user proof of concept built with Codex by firm partner John Savva, the tool was later expanded through collaboration with OpenAI to enhance output quality, enable parallel processing, and support multi-user workflows. Agreement Analyzer integrates Sullivan & Cromwell's internal workflows, curated precedents, negotiating playbooks, and ChatGPT Enterprise. When a lawyer inputs a draft agreement alongside selected precedents and playbooks, the tool conducts multiple review cycles from different perspectives. It then synthesizes the outputs to help identify potential issues, returning a memorandum and proposed tracked changes for lawyers to inspect, adapt, or reject. According to Savva, recent improvements in AI analytical capabilities have allowed the technology to expand beyond repetitive administrative duties into challenging legal tasks like complex agreement analysis. The system utilizes adversarial processes where specialized agents review agreements in parallel for market deviations, risk allocation, clause interactions, and ambiguities. Savva emphasizes transparency as crucial for trustworthiness, noting that lawyers must be able to see the source of any market practice claims made by AI tools. Sullivan & Cromwell continues to explore task-specific legal tools, with Savva pointing to recent advances in reasoning capabilities as a key driver in supporting more of the research and writing process.