How to run an AI contract review before you sign a subcontract (checklist)

Most subcontracts get signed on a skim. Not because anyone thinks that is wise, but because the price of the alternative, days of turnaround or a legal invoice, does not fit a tender deadline. The result is that the clauses that decide whether you get paid are routinely discovered after the event they govern.

AI changed the economics of that skim. Here is the checklist we use with contractors: what to check, the exact questions to ask, and where the AI's answer stops and your judgement starts.

What should an AI contract review check before signing?

Eight clause families, because in our experience of working through subcontract disputes with Australian contractors, nearly every one traces back to the same short list. Locate all eight, read them cited, and you have covered the terms most likely to cost you money:

1. Payment terms and security. When you invoice, when you are paid, retention percentage and caps, and release milestones.
2. Notice provisions and time bars. Every clause that says you lose an entitlement unless you give notice within a period. These are the quiet killers; windows of 5 to 10 business days are common in Australian subcontracts, and some run from when you "ought to have become aware", not from the event.
3. Variations and directions. Who can direct a variation, in what form, and whether unwritten directions are valid.
4. Delay and EOT entitlements. What events qualify, what the notice chain is, and whether delay costs travel with the time.
5. Liquidated damages. The rate, the cap, and what date they run from.
6. Defects liability. Period, rectification obligations, and whether it restarts on rectified work.
7. Termination and suspension triggers. Especially termination for convenience and what you are owed if it is used.
8. Amendments to the standard form. If it is "AS 4902 as amended", the amendments are the contract. Ask the AI to list every departure.

What exact questions should you ask the AI?

Ask for locations, periods and departures, not for opinions. Questions that demand a cited clause produce checkable answers; questions that invite judgement produce plausible essays. These are the prompts that earn their keep:

• "List every clause that requires me to give notice, with the time period, the trigger date, and what I lose if I miss it."
• "What are the payment terms, retention amounts and release dates?"
• "Who bears the risk of latent conditions?"
• "List every amendment to the standard form and what each one changes."
• "What is the liquidated damages rate and cap, and how is the date for practical completion adjusted?"
• "Is there anything unusual in this contract compared with a typical subcontract?" (Treat this one as a conversation starter, not a conclusion.)

Then the discipline that makes the whole exercise trustworthy: click through every citation. If the tool cannot show you the clause it relied on, or the clause it cites does not say what the answer claims, stop using that answer. A general chatbot will do a decent job of explaining clauses you paste in, but for whole-contract review the citation requirement is the dividing line; we wrote up why in Can you use ChatGPT for construction documents?

What can't AI review tell you?

Three things, and being clear about them is what separates a useful review from a false sense of security. It cannot tell you whether a clause is enforceable in your jurisdiction, that is legal advice. It cannot tell you whether a commercial term is acceptable, that is your risk appetite and your margin. And it cannot negotiate, a review that finds a brutal time bar has not yet changed it.

What it does is change what you take to the people who can. Arriving at a lawyer's office with eight cited clause families and two flagged departures turns a reading engagement into a negotiating one, which is a materially cheaper hour.

What do you do with the review after you sign?

This is the step almost everyone skips, and it is where the money actually leaks. A pre-signing review that identifies a 7-business-day delay notice window is worth nothing on day 6 of a delay if nobody remembers it. Before the contract goes in the drawer, extract every notice obligation into deadlines your team will actually see, and decide now who sends what when an event occurs.

The mechanical version: for each notice clause, record the trigger, the period, and whether it runs on calendar or business days, then diarise from the trigger, not from when the paperwork gets around to itself. Our free notice time bar calculator does the working-day arithmetic, and the notice and claim drafter will draft the notice itself when an event lands. Both run in the browser, no signup. For what a well-built claim looks like at the other end, see our guide to variation and EOT claims that get approved.

This after-signing half is also where Alloovium differs from one-shot review tools: the contract stays in the same corpus as your emails, meetings and drawings, so when a delay event shows up in site correspondence, the notice obligation and its deadline are already connected to it.

The checklist, in one place

Print this half, ignore the rest:

• Get the full contract, all schedules, annexures and amendments, as text-readable PDFs
• Run the eight clause families and read every answer's citation
• List every notice obligation: trigger, period, calendar vs business days
• List every departure from the standard form
• Check the tool's confidentiality terms before uploading anything
• Escalate unusual or heavily amended terms to a construction lawyer
• Diarise every notice deadline before signing
• Assign an owner for notices during delivery

What to do next

Run the checklist on the subcontract currently sitting in your inbox. If you want the review and the after-signing monitoring in one place, with every answer cited back to the clause it came from, book a demo and bring that contract. Or start with the free tools at /tools and see how far they get you first.