How to Use AI to Review an Employment Contract

Note from our CEO, Dorna Moini: As an employment lawyer at Sidley Austin, I reviewed hundreds of contracts: offer letters, severance agreements, IP assignments. The patterns were always the same: spot missing protections, flag overreaching provisions, revise boilerplate. It was important work, but also repetitive. I often found myself thinking, “Why am I manually rewriting this clause for the tenth time this week?" That experience is part of what led us to build Gavel Exec.

In this guide, I’ll walk through how legal teams, whether in firms or in-house, can use Gavel Exec to streamline employment contract review, reduce risk, and stay focused on what actually requires legal judgment.

Use Gavel Exec to Spot Missing, Risky or Off-Market Clauses in Seconds

When reviewing a new employment agreement, one of the first things lawyers do is scan for critical clauses that are either missing, incomplete, or potentially problematic for your client. AI can make this process faster and more consistent by reviewing the contract and automatically flagging issues.

For example, if you’re reviewing an offer letter and it doesn’t include a termination clause, AI can flag that omission and let you insert standard language with one click. If the agreement includes a non-compete clause that is unusually broad, for instance, a five-year restriction across all of North America, it will alert you to potential enforceability concerns and offer more defensible fallback language.

Typical issues flagged by Gavel Exec in employment contracts include:

• No “at-will” employment disclaimer or language
• Severance provisions that are ambiguous or silent on triggers
• IP assignment clauses that do not mention “work made for hire” or moral rights waivers
• Arbitration clauses missing governing rules, venue, or carveouts
• Confidentiality clauses with no exception for legally compelled disclosure
• Non-solicitation provisions that lack a time limit or geographic scope

Instead of worrying you missed any of these issues, AI can surface them for you directly so you can review, edit, or dismiss as appropriate.

Apply a Playbook to Standardize Your Internal Positions

One of the most powerful features of Gavel Exec is the ability to create and apply AI Playbooks that reflect your firm’s or department’s internal contract review standards. Playbooks act as structured review instructions for the AI, allowing it to automatically check for specific provisions, preferred phrasing, and fallback positions.

For example, you might create a “Standard Employment Agreement Review” Playbook that includes various rules, including but not limited to:

• Flag if the agreement is missing a non-disparagement clause
• Flag if termination provisions are missing a cure period
• Flag if severance is offered but not conditioned on a release
• Flag if the non-compete extends beyond 12 months
• Flag if equity language is silent on vesting or acceleration

Once this Playbook is created, you can apply it to any document. Gavel Exec will scan the agreement and generate a summary of where the contract complies, where it diverges, and exactly how it should be marked up for your preferences,. Then you can accept/reject, or edit the redlines that were suggested. This makes it easy to delegate first-pass reviews to junior attorneys or legal ops without losing control over the final review process.

You can also modify Playbooks over time as your standards evolve or your client preferences change.

Benchmark Clauses Against Your Own Past Agreements or Market Norms

Employment contracts vary widely in tone and substance depending on the seniority of the role, the jurisdiction, and the company’s risk tolerance. When reviewing unfamiliar language, especially in executive agreements, it can be helpful to know how similar clauses have been handled in the past.

For example:

• A non-compete clause that prohibits working for any competitor in any capacity for 24 months can be compared to your firm’s last 50 employment agreements, revealing that 12 months is the norm and that most carve out advisory or passive investment roles.
• A bonus clawback provision with vague triggers can be benchmarked against your prior agreements to see if similar clauses have included specific thresholds or definitions of misconduct.
• An IP assignment clause can be checked to ensure it includes the same level of detail and enforcement language used in prior high-risk jurisdictions.

This benchmarking gives attorneys confidence when deciding whether to accept, revise, or push back on a clause. When using AI tools like Gavel, you can compare to Gavel's benchmarks across agreements, or you can use your own library of agreements (in a "Project") to use as precedent for both what is standard and for the tone, style, and language (e.g., written in plain english v. more legalese, depending on how you typically write).

Customize AI-Training Across Your Team to Promote Consistency

If you have preferred language for certain provisions, whether a stock severance template, a narrow non-compete fallback, or a jurisdiction-specific arbitration clause, you can add it to a Playbook or Project, which allows you to apply consistent language across contracts and teams.

Once saved, Gavel Exec can suggest your preferred clause when a similar provision is found, or when a key clause is missing entirely. This is particularly useful for:

• Ensuring that equity grant language includes board approval conditions
• Maintaining consistent IP assignment language across full-time and contractor agreements
• Reinforcing preferred termination notice periods or non-disparagement terms

This standardization helps reduce the risk of contract drift across similar agreement types.

Make Your Review Process More Scalable Without Sacrificing Judgment

Reviewing employment contracts still requires human legal judgment. But not every clause demands you write it from scratch. Gavel Exec helps you focus your time and attention on what matters most while automating the rest. That might mean using the tool to do a quick issue scan before a client call, applying your playbook to triage a batch of contractor agreements, or generating a redline for a new executive offer letter you’ve never seen before.

The legal review process doesn’t go away, but it becomes faster, more consistent, and more defensible.

Who Benefits Most from Using Gavel Exec in Employment Workflows

Gavel Exec is used by both law firms and in-house teams across a range of employment-related use cases:

• Law firms reviewing draft agreements from startup clients
• In-house counsel reviewing executive contracts
• Legal ops teams managing high volumes of contractor agreements
• HR and legal teams aligning offer letters with internal templates
• Junior attorneys learning what to flag in employment review

Even teams without formal knowledge management systems can create repeatable, scalable contract review processes by building lightweight playbooks and clause libraries inside Gavel Exec.

Get Started

Gavel Exec is available as a Microsoft Word add-in. Once installed, you can start reviewing real contracts using a preloaded set of employment playbooks and clause benchmarks. No setup or technical training is required.

The free trial includes:

• 15 AI-powered actions (review 15 documents, run 15 Playbooks, or analyze 15 contracts with Projects)
• Instant access to employment-focused playbooks and templates

To try it, open Word, launch the Gavel Exec sidebar, and ask the chat to review your employment contract. Within seconds, you’ll get a full issue list, with suggested edits and explanations you can act on immediately.

Start your Gavel Exec free trial

‍