Browse docs
Playbooks
Practice intelligence
Build firm playbooks that benchmark documents against your own standards, risk thresholds, and negotiation positions
Playbooks are 8rney's Practice Intelligence Engine. A playbook encodes your firm's or team's specific standards for a practice area — what acceptable risk looks like, which clause positions you typically hold, which deviations you flag as material. Once a playbook is built, any document can be benchmarked against it in seconds.
Why playbooks exist#
Every firm and legal team has standards that live in the heads of senior lawyers — what a market-standard indemnity looks like, which governing law is acceptable, how long a non-compete should be. Playbooks make that institutional knowledge explicit and reusable. A junior associate running a playbook gets the same benchmark a partner would apply manually.
Building a playbook#
Choose a practice area
Select one of the six built-in practice areas: Commercial, Corporate, Employment, IP, Litigation, or Regulatory. Each has a pre-configured set of benchmark dimensions you can customise.
Set your standards
For each dimension — governing law, liability cap, termination notice, arbitration seat — define what your firm considers acceptable, preferred, and unacceptable. The Playbook Builder form walks you through every dimension.
Add negotiation memory
Optionally, provide examples of your firm's historical positions — clauses you have previously accepted, language you typically propose, fallbacks you have agreed to. The AI uses these as context when generating recommendations.
Publish the playbook
Published playbooks are available to all members of your workspace. Unpublished playbooks are private to the creator.
Running a benchmark#
- Open any document in the Document editor, or go to Playbooks and click Benchmark a document.
- Select the playbook to benchmark against.
- Click Run — the AI compares the document against every dimension in the playbook.
The result is a structured Findings table with:
- A risk badge per finding (high / medium / low)
- The specific clause text from the document
- The playbook standard it was compared against
- A recommendation (accept / negotiate / reject)
Findings table#
The Findings table shows every deviation discovered by the benchmark. For each finding you can:
- Accept — mark as reviewed and acceptable in this context
- Negotiate — flag for negotiation with suggested language
- Reject — mark as unacceptable for escalation
- Add a note — record why a deviation was accepted or rejected
Export#
Export the full findings report as:
- DOCX — formatted findings report with clause text, risk levels, and recommendations
- Redline — the original document with tracked changes showing proposed revisions based on the playbook
Run the playbook at the start of a contract review, not the end. Early findings shape the negotiation strategy rather than just documenting what you eventually agreed to.
On this page