How AI and Legal Design Work Together to Draft Better Contracts

AI is everywhere right now, and yes, it’s coming for contracts too. The question is: can AI actually make contracts better? Easier to understand, faster to negotiate, more usable in real life?

The short answer: yes, if you know how to use it. The longer answer: AI is not a magic wand. It’s an assistant, not an architect. It needs your intelligence, your instructions, your methodology, and your validation, to produce results that are useful, accurate, and legally sound.

That’s where the Contract and Legal Design methodology comes in. With our proven-and-tested five-step framework, document mapping, language, visuals, navigation, and process, you can use AI as a powerful accelerator, while avoiding its pitfalls. 

Let’s break down how AI can support each step of contract legal design, the dangers to watch out for, and practical tips to get the most out of it.

1. Document Mapping & Information Architecture

You send your client a 50-page service agreement from. They start reading, but it’s a wall of dense legal jargon. Five minutes in, they’re lost and confused. They have a scenario in mind: “What happens if X occurs?”. So they pick up the phone to call for clarification. And now, you have to explain everything again, even though you actually spent hours drafting the document.

Document mapping is the practice of analyzing a contract or policy to identify sections, redundancies, and logical groupings, then visually organizing them so users, lawyers, business teams, or clients, can quickly understand structure and flow.

💎 The benefit: 

Every contract starts with its skeleton: the structure, the sequence, the information architecture. If this is wrong, everything else, language, visuals, even navigation, will wobble. AI can help by scanning your contract, listing clauses, spotting redundancies, and suggesting a more logical sequence. For example, it might group all delivery obligations with the related payment triggers, or align termination rights with the consequences that follow. You can even ask AI to create a table to map your current contract. This is an enormous timesaver. Instead of manually sifting through dozens of pages, AI gives you a starting point for re-structuring.

🤖 AI prompt you can use: 

"Analyze this contract to identify sections that could be regrouped, redundant content removed, or reordered for clarity. Suggest a structure optimized for business users and internal teams. Present your recommendations in a table: Current Section | Suggested Grouping | Reason | User Benefit."

🚨 The pitfall to avoid: 

AI doesn’t know your users. What feels “logical” in a machine’s output may not actually help a project manager or a procurement officer find what they need.

✅ Validation tip:

Validate whether the sequence makes sense for users. Simply ask users: “Which clauses matter most to you in practice?” Put those terms upfront to match their priorities.

2. Language Optimization for Clarity and Precision

You marketing and sales team worked hard at getting leads and signing new customers for your SaaS software. But when the contract is sent, deals seems to stall. Prospects seem lost and confused and the next thing you know, more emails from prospects' lawyers with a ton of redlines to deal with.

Language optimization involves converting legalese into plain, clear, and precise language so that non-lawyers can understand their rights, obligations, and timelines without changing the legal meaning.

💎 The benefit: 

Clarity in contracts is business gold. Research shows that plain language increases comprehension by up to 50%, increase information retention by 40% and prevents disputes down the line. AI can help here by:

• Translating legalese into plain language

• Generating summaries for each clause

• Offering alternative phrasings for readability

This is particularly useful if you or your stakeholders are nervous about rewriting the entire contract in plain language. You can keep the full legal text while adding AI-generated summaries in shaded boxes, so every reader gets both precision and clarity.

🤖 AI prompt you can use: 

"Rewrite this clause in plain language that a non-lawyer business user can easily understand, without changing its legal meaning. Include a one-line summary or key takeaway for quick reference."

🚨 The pitfall to avoid: 

Sometimes AI oversimplifies and “drops” key nuance. A single missing qualifier (“reasonable” vs. “absolute”) can completely change the risk profile.

✅ Validation tip:

Double-check the legal accuracy of any simplified text. And where possible, test comprehension with non-lawyers. If they understand the clause correctly and the legal meaning is intact, you’ve hit the sweet spot. 

3. Visuals as Clarifiers and Attention Pointers

Your vendor reviews the contract you sent them. It's a wall of text filled with jargon and rather complicated (read = confusing) clauses. But when it comes to the business terms, your vendor can reply upon an appendix with a Gantt timeline for the project deadlines and a corresponding table for the payment schedule. Suddenly the operational clauses are all crystal clear. What could otherwise be extremely confusing in paragraphs, now make instant sense.

Using visuals means translating critical clauses into tables, flowcharts, timelines, or icons to make key information instantly comprehensible and easier to act upon.

💎 The benefit: 

Humans are visual creatures. Diagrams, timelines, and flowcharts help readers see obligations, dependencies, and milestones at a glance. AI tools can generate quick visual drafts, which you can refine into polished deliverables.For example:

• Delivery timelines shown as a Gantt chart

• Payment triggers illustrated in a step-by-step flow

• Responsibilities mapped in a swimlane diagram

AI is excellent for prototyping, generating multiple drafts in seconds, sparking creativity, and avoiding blank-page paralysis. In our courses, we show how to use AI wisely as a brainstorming assistant, for example, to suggest how to regroup sections under typical user actions or create draft navigation layouts. But then we teach participants to polish those prototypes with precision, ensuring clauses like delivery terms, payment schedules, or dispute resolution pathways are not just easier to find but also accurate, enforceable, and business-friendly.

🤖 AI prompt you can use: 

"Propose 2–3 ways to visualize this clause to help users understand it faster (e.g., flowchart, table, timeline, icons). Provide a text-based prototype and explain how each visualization improves comprehension or highlights critical points."

🚨 The pitfall to avoid: 

Today’s AI often produces visuals that are too generic or inaccurate for legal precision. Timelines might look pretty but miss key dependencies. Flowcharts might skip critical exceptions.

✅ Validation tip:

Use AI visuals as a brainstorming tool, not the final product. Then polish them with accuracy in mind. The good news is that polishing visuals is easier than most lawyers think. In our courses, we show that lawyers and contract professionals are perfectly capable of making these visuals themselves, with basic tools like PowerPoint. And if you’d rather not do it yourself, you can always outsource the visuals.

4. Document Navigation & User Experience

You’re reviewing a 70-page agreement. Halfway through, you need to check termination rights, but there’s no clickable menu. You scroll, scroll, scroll, wasting time. Sure you're used to scrolling but what if you could just click instead and find exactly what you need? Cross-references could be so much easier to review with hyperlinks, instead of endless back-and-forth scrolls.

Navigation is designing contracts or policies so that readers can quickly find the information they need, with menus, anchors, links, or other tools that reflect a logical structure and user-focused layout.

💎 The benefit: 

Navigation makes or breaks usability. Even a beautifully worded contract fails if users can’t find what they need. AI can support here by suggesting better layouts, highlighting headings, or creating structured tables of contents that act as a roadmap.For instance, you can prompt AI to:

• Design tables of contents that double as navigation guides

This transforms a dense PDF into a document that feels like a tool, not a trap. Table of Contents can act as a navigation guide. Think of it as a visual map, not just a list. 

A great real-world example of intuitive navigation comes from PayPal’s User Agreement. Instead of burying readers in endless text, PayPal uses a sidebar-based table of contents that mirrors the way people actually use the platform. Headings like “About Your Account,” “Sending Money,” and “Selling and Accepting Payments” aren’t just labels, they serve as navigation hubs for specific user actions. 

🤖 AI prompt you can use: 

"Review this document and suggest a navigation system for online or digital reading (e.g., table of contents, sticky menu, links). Recommend section ordering and labeling that helps users find key information quickly and understand the flow."

🚨 The pitfall to avoid: 

Navigation is only as good as your information architecture. If the underlying sequence is messy, AI can’t save it with formatting tricks.

✅ Validation tip:

Navigation is only as good as the structure behind it. Loop back to Step 1. You can also use AI to brainstorm navigation structures like this: regrouping sections under typical user actions, proposing clearer headings, and suggesting more logical groupings to make your contracts feel more like usable guides than static documents. 

5. Legal Process Mapping & Service Blueprints

The legal team is always known as a blocker, and yet it seems that Legal is not late at reviewing document but that everyone follows slightly different steps for contract intake. A contract intake visual map now shows each person’s role, decision points, and handoffs, and suddenly inefficiencies and overlaps become obvious. It's now easy to fix the process for good.

Process mapping charts workflows, roles, and decision points, revealing opportunities for efficiency and alignment. Service blueprints take this further by linking legal processes to the customer journey, ensuring internal actions deliver real user value.

💎 The benefit: 

Contracts don’t live on paper; they live in processes. Who approves, who signs, who delivers, who pays, all of it can be mapped. AI can help by generating draft process flows, swimlanes, or blueprints based on your prompts. This is invaluable for clarifying how contracts interact with business operations. For example, you can map how an invoice request flows from procurement to finance, or how delays trigger notifications and remedies. 

🤖 AI prompt you can use: 

"Create a step-by-step process map for this legal workflow showing roles, responsibilities, and handoffs. Identify decision points, redundancies, and potential efficiency improvements. Suggest how the workflow aligns with the user or client journey and where technology could support better outcomes."

🚨 The pitfall to avoid: 

AI often produces idealized processes that don’t reflect reality. Missing hand-offs, compliance checks, or escalation paths can create more confusion than clarity. 

✅ Validation tip:

Cross-check any AI-generated process maps with the people who actually run those workflows. If the process map doesn’t match the real process, confusion is inevitable.

The Big Picture: AI + Legal Design = Better Business

Here’s the bigger truth: AI on its own will not save contracts. But paired with the legal design framework, it becomes a powerful enabler. Why? Because legal design provides the intelligence and methodology that AI lacks. It tells you what to ask for, how to validate it, and how to turn a draft into a usable, business-ready contract.

The outcome?

• Contracts that are faster to negotiate (saving up to 20 days per review and as much as $100,000 per contract).

• Agreements that are easier to understand, meaning fewer disputes and stronger business relationships.

• Legal teams seen not as blockers, but as enablers.

Final Word of Caution about AI

AI is an accelerator, not a replacement. The real dangers are:

1. Believing AI’s draft is the final product.

2. Forgetting to test comprehension with users.

3. Skipping the legal validation step.

The sweet spot is aiming for both clarity and legal precision. When you achieve that, your contracts don’t just protect you legally, they also drive better business outcomes.

So use AI boldly, but wisely. Treat it as your assistant, not your architect. And always remember: the smartest tool in the room is still you.

👉  Want to receive full guidance on using AI for contract and legal design? Join our Online Contract and Legal Design Certification Course or email us for inquiries: [email protected] - We're happy to help.