Legal Document Review: Keys to Understanding the Process

Key takeaways:

• Recognize that legal document review serves two critical purposes: fulfilling legal obligations by producing relevant, non-privileged documents during litigation, and managing risk by reducing the costs associated with poor contract management, which typically results in organizations losing 5-9% of annual revenue.

• Leverage AI-powered document review tools to handle the 80% of repetitive work like identifying key clauses and flagging deviations from standard language, allowing your legal team to focus expertise on the 20% that requires strategic thinking and negotiation.

• Implement centralized systems that provide real-time transparency into workflow status and create a single source of truth for all contract data, eliminating version control issues and the information silos that create bottlenecks in the review process.

• Distinguish between the four main types of legal document review—litigation and discovery, contract review, due diligence, and internal compliance investigations—as each has different goals and requires different approaches to achieve accurate results.

How much time does your team spend reviewing documents? With fifty-nine percent of CLOs reporting increased workloads according to the ACC’s 2024 Chief Legal Officers Survey, it’s probably more than you’d like to admit. Document review is one of those necessary tasks that can either run smoothly or become a bottleneck that slows down everything else.

Whether you’re dealing with litigation discovery, contract negotiations, or due diligence for an acquisition, understanding how document review actually works—and how to make it more efficient—can make a real difference in your day-to-day work.

What is legal document review?

Legal document review is the systematic process of examining, analyzing, and categorizing documents to identify relevant information for legal proceedings or contract management. During this process, legal teams and document reviewers sort through data to determine which materials are relevant to a case, which documents contain privileged information, and which should be produced to opposing parties.

The review process serves two primary functions. First, it helps legal teams examine internal documents for case relevance. Second, it ensures attorneys meet their legal obligations when opposing parties request documents during litigation discovery.

The challenge is that modern businesses generate massive amounts of digital data across multiple platforms and systems. Without the right approach, this can turn document review into an overwhelming task. However, modern document review systems have fundamentally transformed the process. With the right technology in place, you and your legal team can review huge volumes of data with incredible accuracy and speed. This technological shift has made it financially feasible to conduct remote document reviewing or hire outside document review attorneys to handle large requests that would have been prohibitively expensive just a few years ago.

What is the purpose of document review?

Legal document review serves two critical purposes in the contracting and litigation process. The primary purpose is enabling attorneys to fulfill their legal obligations by producing relevant, non-privileged documents when opposing parties make formal requests during litigation.

The secondary purpose involves managing risk and costs. Most of the work and associated expenses occur during the individual document examination phase, where teams must balance thoroughness with efficiency. This balance is financially vital, as organizations typically lose five to nine percent of their annual revenue due to poor contract management, according to The 2025 Legal Operations Field Guide.

Here’s where it gets tricky: the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require attorneys to produce all relevant documents, but determining what’s actually “relevant” isn’t always straightforward. You also need to identify privileged items that can be legally withheld, even if they’re relevant to the case. These judgment calls are what make document review both critical and complex—every document decision could impact your case or compliance posture.

Requests for producing relevant documents from an opposing party can include a wide range of documentation. They can ask for medical records, insurance policies, internal product evaluations, testing, receipts, records of repair, accounting, and investigations. You and your legal team must individually examine, sort, and review each of these written documents.

Types of legal document review

When people hear “document review,” they usually think of litigation and discovery. That’s a big part of it, but in reality, you’re reviewing documents for different reasons all the time. It’s helpful to think about it in a few key buckets:

• Litigation and discovery review: This is the classic scenario. You’re responding to a discovery request in a lawsuit, and you need to sift through mountains of emails, files, and other data to find what’s relevant and what’s privileged. The goal is to meet your legal obligations without accidentally handing over sensitive information.
• Contract review: This is a core responsibility for most in-house teams. You’re not looking for evidence, you’re looking for risk, obligations, and opportunities. This includes reviewing third-party paper coming from sales or procurement, checking for non-standard terms, and making sure the agreement aligns with your company’s playbook.
• Due diligence review: During a merger or acquisition, you have to review the other company’s contracts to understand what you’re actually buying. You’re looking for liabilities, change of control clauses, termination rights, and any other hidden “gotchas” that could affect the deal’s value.
• Internal and compliance investigations: When there’s an internal issue, like a compliance concern or an HR complaint, you need to review internal documents to understand what happened. The focus here is on fact-finding and assessing internal risk.

How do you perform a document review?

Review for relevance

Relevance review determines whether each document contains information pertinent to the legal matter at hand. This initial screening step separates potentially useful materials from irrelevant ones.

During relevance review, teams use keyword lists and filtering techniques to narrow the document pool. Modern review platforms let you tag or mark documents by relevance level, creating an organized system for prioritizing what gets deeper examination.

Review for privilege

Not all documents will be produced, but you must review all documents. You can declare privilege on individual documents and information to withhold them from the other party. If a document is determined to be privileged, you can tag or mark it and add it to a privilege log entry.

Review for confidentiality

It’s critical to review for confidentiality when you’re dealing with valuable client data. Either side can return privileged documents that are produced accidentally. It’s also part of the document review process to redact private or sensitive data.

AI-powered document review tools

Let’s be honest—manually reviewing every single document is not a scalable strategy, especially when 83% of legal departments face rising demand according to CLOC’s 2025 State of the Industry Report. This is where AI tools come in. In fact, contract review is now the dominant AI application across the industry, with 28% of respondents identifying it as their most impactful AI use case according to The State of AI in Legal 2025 Report. They aren’t here to replace your legal judgment, but they act as a powerful assistant to get through the repetitive work faster and more accurately.

Here’s what that actually looks like:

• Automated first pass: Instead of reading every line of a 30-page MSA, you can let AI for contract review handle the initial scan. It can automatically identify and tag key clauses like Limitation of Liability, Indemnification, and Governing Law. This lets you jump straight to the sections that matter most.
• Risk detection: You can teach the AI what your standard positions are based on your company’s playbook. When it reviews a third-party contract, it can automatically flag clauses that deviate from your preferred language. This turns a long review process into a simple exception-based check.
• Consistency checks: AI is great at spotting inconsistencies that a human eye might miss after hours of reading. It can ensure defined terms are used correctly throughout a document or that a key date is consistent across all clauses.

The point isn’t to let the AI make the decision for you. The point is to let it handle the 80% of the work that is tedious and repetitive, so you can focus your expertise on the 20% that requires strategic thinking and negotiation. This partnership is working—93% of legal professionals agree that AI has improved how they work, as noted in the report.

Who reviews documents?

An attorney usually oversees document review at a high level, but litigation support professionals and paralegals can also manage the process.

In practice, document reviewers today work with sophisticated software platforms that help them sort, categorize, and analyze documents more efficiently. The technology handles much of the repetitive work—filtering by keywords, identifying document types, and flagging potential issues—so reviewers can focus on the judgment calls that require legal expertise. While the specific workflow varies depending on the case and your team’s preferences, most review projects follow similar patterns and considerations.

Considerations for a document review process

Gaining transparency for review

Document review transparency means giving legal teams real-time visibility into workflow status, progress, and critical decision points. Without transparency, reviewers work in information silos that create bottlenecks and delays.

Consider how this transparency advantage plays out in practice. When Fitbit needed a more efficient way to track research participant consent—a process that required reviewing and monitoring thousands of individual consent documents and status changes—they implemented a new workflow using Ironclad’s Workflow Designer. The transparency features allowed them to track consent information and document status in real time, eliminating the manual review bottlenecks that had previously slowed their research operations. “Ironclad enabled a step change, rather than an incremental one,” says Fitbit’s head of legal operations, Emelita Hernandez-Bravo.

Modern workflow tools provide legal teams with automated alerts and triggers throughout the document review process. These informational prompts reduce manual tracking burdens:

• Counterparty replied with new version
• Update to governing law detected
• Fallbacks and approvals triggered
• Signature packet ready to send

Arrival of docx native

Here’s a challenge you’ve probably experienced: Microsoft Word’s docx format wasn’t designed for legal document collaboration, even though it’s the most common tool for contract creation and review. The result? A sluggish, disconnected process with documents scattered across multiple inboxes and stuck at various completion stages.

Ironclad addressed this challenge by developing the world’s first docx-native contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution and launched it in September 2020 at their State of Digital Contracting event. This innovative CLM solution allows legal teams to collaborate across Microsoft Word seamlessly. Legal teams get a docx-native experience on a modern, cloud-based digital contracting platform.

The document review benefits of this approach are significant. Take L’Oréal’s experience: they used the docx-native cloud CLM to create and manage strategic influencer agreements in 15 countries worldwide. The seamless document review and collaboration process allowed their legal teams to efficiently review contract terms, track changes, and coordinate approvals across multiple jurisdictions without the usual version control headaches. The experience was so smooth that “It’s like texting a friend,” says L’Oréal USA’s advertising counsel Elyssa Dunleavy, who also spoke at the State of Digital Contracting event.

One single source of truth

A single source of truth (SSOT) is an information architecture where all stakeholders access the same centralized, up-to-date contract data rather than working from scattered copies. This structure eliminates version control issues and ensures consistent decision-making across your organization.

Implementing SSOT is possible even when working with third-party documents. The key is creating a centralized system where everyone reviews the same contracts and references identical data when making business decisions.

This gives your team a definitive single version of the truth. Your company can achieve this by using a central system to track and manage all your contract data, no matter where it’s stored.

A database like Ironclad’s dynamic Contract Repository doesn’t contain the actual data. Instead, it contains metadata that describes the actual data and pinpoints its location. Updates to the primary location are instantly published to the entire system, which eliminates duplicate legal documents, data, and work.

How do you review your documents internally?

Internal document review processes typically follow a more structured approach than ad hoc external reviews. When you’re reviewing your own company’s documents—whether for compliance audits, policy updates, or risk assessments—you have the advantage of knowing your systems and having direct access to the people who created the documents.

However, the most comprehensive and resource-intensive document review still occurs during litigation discovery. This phase involves attorneys formally exchanging information, documents, and evidence with opposing counsel, often requiring review of voluminous materials that may be presented at trial.

Legal document review follows a structured seven-step process that transforms raw documents into organized, legally compliant materials. For each document reviewed, attorneys must complete the following actions:

• Collect
• Examine
• Identify
• Preserve
• Process
• Review
• Analyze

CLM solutions automate document review processes, making large-scale digital data examination manageable for legal teams. Automation reduces the time-consuming manual work that traditionally bogs down legal operations—and according to the ABA’s 2025 Legal Industry Report, 82% of legal departments report improved efficiency from AI adoption.

Modern CLM platforms expand your review capabilities beyond manual, one-by-one examination. These systems use instant metadata searches to collect and filter documents, surfacing the most relevant items without manual sorting. The result is faster document review that lets your legal team focus on high-value analysis rather than administrative tasks.

Centralizing documents for easier review

If your business has multiple people using document planning platforms, communication tools, or mobile applications, it can be more difficult to gather relevant threads of information and data.

Remember that you must also review email and other electronic data. Only a document review process that uses a CLM solution can make massive quantities of digital data readily accessible with the type of speed and accuracy previously unavailable in other forms of document review.

Transform your legal document review process

Modern document review technology can transform how your legal team manages contracts, reduces risk, and speeds up business cycles. The right platform centralizes your documents, automates routine review tasks, and surfaces critical information in seconds rather than hours.

Ironclad’s digital contracting platform delivers these capabilities through a dynamic, AI-powered system recognized by industry analysts. The platform received the Forrester Wave™ award for Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts in Q1 2021, and Ironclad was named one of Forbes’ 20 Rising Stars in the Cloud Top 100 Companies.

Request a demo today to see how Ironclad can improve your document review process and help your legal team drive business value.

Frequently asked questions about legal document review

How long does a typical legal document review take?

There’s no single answer here—it really depends. A simple NDA might take minutes, while a complex M&A due diligence project could take weeks. The key factors are the volume of documents, the complexity of the issues you’re looking for, the size of your review team, and the tools you’re using. Manual review will always be slower than a process augmented by AI.

What’s the difference between contract review and litigation document review?

The main difference is the goal. In litigation, you’re reviewing documents to find evidence and identify privileged information for a legal case. It’s often defensive. With contract review, you’re proactively analyzing agreements to understand business risks, obligations, and commercial terms. It’s about managing your own company’s legal and financial health.

Can AI completely replace human document reviewers?

No, and that’s not the goal. Think of AI as a very smart, very fast paralegal. It can handle the high-volume, repetitive tasks—like finding all the liability clauses across 500 documents—so that human lawyers can focus on exercising judgment, negotiating complex terms, and providing strategic advice. The final call still requires a human.

How do you ensure accuracy in high-volume document reviews?

Accuracy comes from a combination of process and technology. It starts with a clear review protocol or playbook that defines what reviewers should look for. Technology, especially AI, helps by applying those rules consistently across thousands of documents, which reduces human error. Finally, a good process includes quality control, where a second reviewer samples documents or reviews anything flagged as high-risk to confirm the initial assessment.

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Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney. Use of and access to any of the resources contained within Ironclad’s site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the user and Ironclad.