Turn Your Standards Into Stronger Reviews
Build a review-ready playbook that’s grounded in your contracts, precedents, and templates in minutes with Harvey's new playbook builder.
Contracting teams spend more than 40% of their time on routine, low-complexity contract work according to research from EY Law. Playbooks should help reduce that burden, but building them has traditionally been a slow and manual process. Teams stall on setup and end up without playbooks for important agreement types, or create playbooks that quickly grow stale and no longer reflect how they actually negotiate.
Harvey’s new playbook builder builds a review-ready playbook from your existing standards, a corpus of past documents, or from scratch through a guided conversation. In minutes, teams can move from knowledge scattered across documents and individual lawyers to a working standard that supports faster, more consistent first-pass reviews.
Build From Your Standards in Minutes
Most tools treat a playbook as static configuration with a form you fill in, one rule at a time. Harvey treats it as a living artifact you build, leveraging your existing playbooks, marked up contracts, a Harvey-curated template, or from scratch. Harvey analyzes your sources, asks clarifying questions, and drafts rules while a side-by-side panel shows the playbook taking shape in real time.
For example, an in-house team building an MSA playbook can provide its standard template and executed agreements and Harvey can then identify the team’s preferred liability cap, preserve common fallback positions, and surface outlier terms for confirmation instead of requiring lawyers to author every rule manually. As it works, Harvey applies the methodology Harvey’s legal engineers and in-house product lawyers developed while building more than 300 customer playbooks, including how to weigh different inputs, reconcile conflicting precedents, and translate them into rules that produce useful review output.
Capture How Your Team Actually Negotiates
A useful playbook does more than just identify acceptable and unacceptable language by capturing what lawyers do when a term falls between those extremes.
Harvey’s playbook builder helps teams build a playbook from existing materials or from scratch, then encode their preferred positions, fallback language, guidance, actions, conditions, and escalation paths. A data processing rule, for example, can direct Harvey to flag nonstandard breach notification terms for privacy counsel rather than automatically redlining them.
This turns individual know-how into a team-wide standard. More reviewers can handle routine agreements consistently, while the right issues are still escalated to the lawyers with the relevant expertise or authority.
Strengthen Every Rule With Confidence
Quality controls are built into the playbook creation process: Harvey can surface coverage gaps, make rules more specific, and suggest fallback positions. Each rule includes a summary, explanation, and citations to the source documents behind it, helping playbook owners review and approve it quickly.
Once the playbook is ready, you can run it against contracts in Word or the Harvey web app for consistent first-pass reviews. As your standards evolve, you can tell Harvey to update a fallback, liability cap, or escalation path instead of rebuilding the underlying rules manually, making it easier to keep your review guidance current.
For Carvana, scaling playbooks with Harvey reduced drafting and review time by 80%. By making standards easier to apply at scale, stronger playbooks help legal teams apply their standards consistently across greater contract volume and focus lawyer attention on the terms that require judgment.
Ready to see it in practice? Contact your account team or visit harvey.ai to get started.
