SimpleDocs Launches Contract Intelligence Layer

SimpleDocs has launched a ‘Contract Intelligence Layer’, a benchmarking tool for inhouse teams that connects to ‘internal policies, historical precedent, and verified market standards, directly inside Microsoft Word’ – see AL interview below with CEO, Preston Clark.

Here’s how the company, which recently combined with sister business Law Insider, explains things:

‘The Contract Intelligence Layer unifies the three sources of information legal teams actually rely on when making decisions, but have never had in one place:

• Policy Data: What the organization has formally approved, including playbook positions, fallbacks, and escalation thresholds.
• Precedent Data: What the organization has actually accepted in past contracts, exposing patterns, exceptions, and variance between policy and reality.
• Market Standards: How similar terms appear across real, executed agreements in the broader market, providing an external reference point for risk, leverage, and negotiation posture.’

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And here’s the interview with Preston Clark.

Tell us more about the logic behind this.

SimpleDocs is the first and only AI contract solution to integrate your internal policies, historical negotiation precedent, and verifiable market standards powered by Law Insider directly inside Microsoft Word. 

In practical terms, this means we’re unifying the three most critical datasets (see above) lawyers need when drafting and negotiating.

This type of integrated context is the holy grail for legal tech, and we’re certainly not the only ones building in this direction. I do think we hold a significant advantage with the Law Insider data set over our competitors. 

This is about delivering decision-grade context into your drafting and negotiation process. It’s as simple as that. 

Where does the data come from, and how do you know it’s ‘market’?

“What’s Market” is largely an M&A term popularized in the 1990s and early 2000s through deal term studies published by groups like the ABA, the MBCA, NVCA, and major law firms. It focuses on negotiated outcomes within specific transaction types like venture financings, private equity deals, public M&A and is often invoked in negotiation shorthand (“a 1x non-participating liquidation preference is market,” “this no-shop structure is market”). By design, it reflects a relatively narrow slice of transactions, tied to particular deal categories and time periods, and while influential, it represents a limited dataset that can be difficult to translate into a durable, data-driven negotiation strategy.

By contrast, we believe what is far more valuable and far more defensible is “Market Standards.” Market Standards are not derived from deal surveys or a small handful of recent private transactions, but from large-scale empirical analysis of real agreements across industries and contract types. They reflect statistically observable drafting patterns, clause prevalence, structural norms, and language variation across millions of documents. We see a clear distinction between the two concepts, and we do not believe any single data source is better positioned than Law Insider’s corpus to establish refined, evidence-based Market Standards at scale.

Will clients be sharing their actual contract data with you as well?

Yes, but only within a secure, enterprise-controlled environment and solely for that customer’s benefit. We do not resell customer data, and we do not use it to train our models.

Customer contract data is used to generate precedent-based insights and benchmarking specific to that organization. We access it through the SimpleDocs AI Repository or via secure integrations with third-party repositories. This is a closed-loop data integration designed to enhance the customer’s negotiation intelligence not a data harvesting strategy to build our products.

What markets does your data cover? 

At the core of the Market Standard layer is the Law Insider database, the world’s largest publicly referenceable collection of executed contracts and clauses.

Over the past 15 years, Law Insider has built a deep layer of contract intelligence by collecting and analyzing millions of publicly available agreements from around the world. Contract language is parsed into structured data that reveals which clauses are standard for a given agreement, where provisions are commonly missing, how terms vary across industries and jurisdictions, and what language tends to be fair, aggressive, or imbalanced. Spanning more than 40 languages, this dataset represents one of the most comprehensive views of how contracts are actually written and negotiated in the market today – and now serves as a core foundation of the Contract Intelligence Layer within SimpleDocs.

This is not synthetic data. This is not model inference. This is referencable “see source” context to accelerate decision making and improve legal judgement. 

• Millions of real agreements (and thousands more added weekly);
• Organized across industries, jurisdictions, deal sizes, time, and language; and
• With negotiated outcomes, not “aspirational” templates

No general-purpose or legal AI platform has ever integrated this level of market data into the negotiation and drafting process. 

Could this work for law firms as well?

Absolutely. The Law Insider data set has been used for years by lawyers (and law firms) globally. Historically it was used to find standard contract and clause language. But more recently, it’s used as an AI verification tool for drafting and contract review inside the SimpleDocs platform. 

As a practical matter, our software is more focused on the in-house use cases, but thanks to our integration with Law Insider, we have thousands of law firm customers actively using our AI tools on a monthly basis. 

So yes, law firms benefit from our data as well.  

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More about SimpleDocs here. Main pic: Electra Japonas, Preston Clark, Jordan Trevino and Ali Waqar.

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