# First-pass contract review by agents, every judgment gated by counsel

> How legal and compliance teams run contract intake, attestation campaigns, audit evidence, and renewal alerts on Brahmalabs — agents propose, counsel decides, everything logged.

- Canonical: https://www.brahmalabs.io/use-cases/legal-compliance/
- Department: Legal & Compliance
- All departments: https://www.brahmalabs.io/use-cases/

## The reality in legal ops

Legal is the department other teams wait on. Contract review queues grow faster than headcount. Attestation campaigns run on spreadsheets and reminders someone has to remember to send. When an audit lands, evidence lives in inboxes, shared drives, and screenshots — and a week disappears into reconstructing what happened and when.

The work is judgment-heavy, but most of the hours are not judgment. They are extraction, cross-referencing, chasing, and assembly. The reason legal teams have not handed those hours to automation is trust: a tool that sends a notice it should not, or pastes a settlement figure into a model prompt, costs more than it saves.

## What changes with governed agents

Agents do the reading and drafting; the platform does the restraint. Guardrails and PII redaction run before any text reaches a model, so sensitive identifiers can be stripped before inference rather than audited after. Every agent step runs in a sandboxed container with a network egress allowlist, and each run's actual outbound domains are captured and shown on the run page. Credentials stay in a vault — agents get short-lived scoped references, never raw secrets.

Retrieval is grounded and bounded. Agents search playbooks and policies through a read-only tool whose scope is fixed server-side: an agent can only search knowledge bases it was explicitly granted, and answers come back as passages with their source file. A clause question gets a citation, not a guess.

Everything an agent does lands in an append-only audit log spanning eight event categories, with versioned artifacts alongside. That is the same evidence trail your own audits need, produced as a side effect of the work. Customer data is segregated at the data layer — isolated per-customer schemas, so cross-tenant access is structurally impossible rather than policy-prevented. SOC 2 Type II is in progress; that is the exact status, not a certification claim.

## What stays human

Every legal judgment. Agents extract, flag, cross-reference, and draft. Counsel decides. Approval is a first-class workflow node: a run parks durably until a lawyer rules, whether that takes an hour or a week, and it burns no compute while it waits. High-stakes calls can require N-of-M consensus instead of a single approver, with SLA timeouts and escalation chains when reviewers go quiet. Rejections are recorded with the same fidelity as approvals. The queue gets shorter. The accountability does not move.

## The workflows

### 1. Contract intake and first-pass review

- **Trigger:** A new contract arrives on the legal intake email channel or through an intake form webhook.
- **Flow:** An agent extracts parties, term, renewal dates, and payment terms, checks each clause against the playbook via read-only search_kb, and drafts a flag list with cited passages.
- **Human gate:** Counsel reviews every extraction and every flag in the approval inbox — accept, edit, or reject; nothing is marked reviewed without a lawyer's decision.
- **Output:** A review-queue row in Data Tables holding extracted terms, flagged clauses, citations, and the counsel decision.

### 2. Policy attestation campaign

- **Trigger:** A scheduled run opens the campaign — quarterly or on policy change — and seeds one tracker row per person in scope.
- **Flow:** The agent sends attestation requests, records each response against the tracker, and drafts chase messages for non-responders on a set cadence.
- **Human gate:** The compliance lead approves the message templates and campaign scope up front, and signs off on each escalation to a manager.
- **Output:** A Data Tables tracker with per-person status and a completion report artifact when the campaign closes.

### 3. Audit evidence package

- **Trigger:** An auditor request or a scheduled evidence cycle starts the run.
- **Flow:** The agent queries the append-only audit log across its eight event categories, gathers the versioned artifacts in scope, and assembles an evidence index.
- **Human gate:** The compliance owner reviews the index and approves release; nothing leaves the platform without that sign-off.
- **Output:** Auditors get URLs to log queries and versioned artifacts — not zip files assembled by hand.

### 4. Obligations register with renewal alerts

- **Trigger:** A daily schedule scans the obligations register for deadlines and renewal windows entering their notice period.
- **Flow:** The agent cross-checks each approaching obligation against the contract record, drafts the renewal or termination notice, and stages it for review.
- **Human gate:** Counsel decides whether to renew, renegotiate, or terminate — the agent never sends a notice on its own authority.
- **Output:** An updated register row, a drafted notice stored as a versioned artifact, and an alert to the team's Slack channel.

## Platform pieces this leans on

- HITL approvals (single or N-of-M consensus)
- Data Tables
- Append-only audit log (8 event categories)
- Versioned artifacts
- Guardrails + PII redaction before inference
- Customer data segregation at the data layer
- Durable runs with schedules and SLA timeouts
- Vector knowledge base + search_kb

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Brahmalabs — the AgentOps platform for production AI agents. https://www.brahmalabs.io