How to supercharge construction contract review with AI: a lawyer's guide

Construction projects depend on contracts that are often lengthy, complex, and highly negotiated. Legal and operations teams face increasing pressure to review these documents quickly, manage risk, and maintain consistency across projects.

Traditional contract review, with manual checks and offline collaboration, is slow and prone to oversight. As project complexity rises, these methods struggle to scale. This article outlines how AI can streamline contract review in construction, and how to get started using AI for this purpose.

The challenges of traditional construction contract review 

Reviewing construction contracts is resource-intensive. Each agreement must be checked for legal risk, commercial terms, and compliance with internal standards. This includes identifying missing clauses, tracking changes, and ensuring consistency across multiple agreements and versions.

Manual processes are time-consuming and difficult to scale. Deadlines are tight, and legal teams are often spread thin. Errors or delays in review can lead to disputes, compliance failures, or financial exposure. Many companies rely on email, tracked changes, and spreadsheet checklists - tools that offer little efficiency or oversight.

What makes construction contracts so complex?

Construction contracts are particularly demanding to review due to several recurring features:

High risk and financial exposure: Contracts allocate liability for delays, defects, and cost overruns. These terms must be reviewed carefully to manage legal and commercial risk.

Multiple counterparties: Main contractors, subcontractors, consultants, and clients often operate under different terms. Aligning these terms across parties increases complexity.

Frequent amendments: Change orders, scope updates, and version changes are common. Tracking what has changed, and how it affects obligations, requires attention to detail.

Regulatory and jurisdictional variation: Local building codes, procurement rules, and legal requirements vary widely. Contracts must be adapted accordingly, especially for cross-border projects.

Custom drafting: Unlike standard NDAs or service agreements, construction contracts are rarely boilerplate. They contain bespoke language, long clauses, and detailed appendices.

How AI transforms construction contract review

AI helps teams automate the review of long and complex construction agreements while preserving legal oversight. It can process contracts quickly, identify potential risks, and surface changes without relying on manual checks.

Key technologies include:

• Natural language processing (NLP) to understand contract language and structure
• Machine learning (ML) to flag patterns and adapt to prior reviews
• Automation to extract terms, classify clauses, and compare versions

AI handles repetitive tasks, such as identifying high-risk clauses or comparing a new draft to standard terms, and allows legal teams to focus on exceptions and negotiations.

Read more: How to use AI for contract review and analysis 

What makes construction contracts especially suited to AI?

Construction contracts are well-suited to AI review due to their complexity, variability, and legal sensitivity. Unlike standardised commercial agreements, they contain custom drafting, evolving terms, and multiple parties, all of which increase review time and risk exposure. AI helps legal and project teams manage this complexity with greater speed, consistency, and visibility.

1. High-volume, high-stakes documents

Construction projects generate dozens of contracts and subcontracts, often under tight deadlines. Each must be reviewed for legal risk, financial exposure, and compliance. AI accelerates this by automating clause recognition, flagging risk areas, and extracting key terms for faster decision-making.

2. Multiple stakeholders, bespoke clauses

Main contractors, subcontractors, consultants, and clients frequently operate under different terms. AI can detect deviations from standard clauses, highlight conflicting obligations, and help ensure consistency across parties, particularly in payment terms, indemnity language, and scope definitions.

3. Constant amendments and change orders

Project scope evolves throughout the lifecycle. Change orders, updated specs, and scope adjustments introduce new legal and financial risks. AI simplifies version comparison by highlighting what changed and how it affects key clauses like pricing, scheduling, and variation approval processes.

4. Recurring legal risks across contracts

Many risk areas in construction are repeated across contracts, such as vague scopes of work, unclear payment terms, incomplete specifications, or unstructured dispute resolution procedures. AI can identify these patterns and flag missing or ambiguous language across documents at scale.

5. Clause-heavy but structured language

Clauses covering insurance, performance guarantees, subcontractor coordination, and regulatory compliance tend to follow recognisable patterns. AI is good at classifying these provisions and flagging omissions or deviations, turning what was previously manual review into structured, repeatable analysis.

6. Jurisdiction-specific compliance

Construction contracts must reflect local laws, building codes, permit requirements, and dispute frameworks. AI fine-tuned to regional standards can identify jurisdiction-specific gaps or non-compliance, reducing the risk of enforcement issues or downstream claims.

7. High potential for human error

Given the document length and volume of detail, construction contracts are prone to overlooked obligations, especially around termination rights, indemnity scopes, or insurance coverage. AI reduces reliance on manual review and helps legal teams catch gaps that might otherwise be missed.

Why smart construction companies choose LEGALFLY

Construction legal teams face intense pressure: complex contracts, rapid timelines, and high financial stakes. LEGALFLY is a legal AI workspace that has been purpose-built to help you manage risk, speed up reviews, and maintain control - without compromising on quality.

LEGALFLY includes automated anonymisation that redacts sensitive information across text, images, and PDFs before the document is processed by AI.

Unlike generic AI tools, LEGALFLY is trained on legal language, structures, and workflows. It understands clause-level nuance, supports contract versioning, and provides explainable outputs legal teams can trust. 

Here’s how construction firms are using LEGALFLY to save time, reduce cost, and work smarter:

Faster risk reviews  

LEGALFLY’s Review agent flags risky clauses, suggests redlines, and explains edits in plain English. Even complex agreements can be reviewed in minutes, not hours.  

Audit or review dozens of contracts at once

Need to check all subcontractor agreements on a major project? Multi Review lets you review 50+ documents at once, extracting key clauses and highlighting gaps. 

Quick answers during negotiations

With Discovery, project leads and legal counsel can ask questions like “What’s the delay penalty?” and instantly retrieve answers, instead of flipping through dense PDFs mid-meeting.

Keep version control without the manual work

Construction contracts change constantly. Compare highlights every revision and lets you spot scope shifts, payment edits, and late-stage risks in seconds, reducing the chance of expensive oversights.

Translate on the fly for cross-border projects

Working across jurisdictions? LEGALFLY’s Translation agent supports 20+ languages with formatting intact, making it easy to review contracts in multiple regions without outside counsel.

Create your own review workflows

With Custom Agents, you can train LEGALFLY to flag specific risks common in your projects, such as unclear indemnity caps or missing force majeure language, turning organisational knowledge into repeatable AI logic.

Read more: Everything you need to know about agentic AI for legal work

Common challenges when adopting AI for contract review, and how to solve them

While the benefits of AI in contract review are well documented, construction firms often encounter barriers during adoption. These include:

Data privacy and security

AI tools should protect commercially sensitive data, including pricing, parties, and project-specific terms. LEGALFLY addresses this by anonymising all sensitive information before processing, ensuring compliance with internal and external data standards.

Staff readiness and tool adoption

Many legal and ops teams are unfamiliar with AI workflows. Adoption improves when the platform is intuitive, offers contextual guidance, and integrates into current systems. LEGALFLY’s interface in Word, for example, requires minimal change in daily routines.

Read more: LEGALFLY and Microsoft announce collaboration to bring privacy-first legal AI to enterprise

Trust in AI output

Scepticism is common when risk assessments are automated. Transparent tools that provide explainable outputs, such as clause-level analysis or comparisons with past contracts, build confidence. LEGALFLY supports this by showing not just what changed, but why it matters.

Get started with AI-powered contract review

Construction projects move fast. Manual contract review can’t keep pace. AI delivers a practical way to cut review time, flag risks earlier, and manage complexity at scale.

LEGALFLY helps construction teams do exactly that with tools for clause detection, document comparison, multi-language support, and built-in anonymisation. Teams using LEGALFLY reduce errors, speed up reviews, and gain better control over contract workflows.