Preferred, acceptable, fallback, red line.Written once, in your own words.Every analyzed contract gets a score out of 100 and a clause-by-clause report.
“1% of the monthly amount per day of delay, capped at 10%”
Cap at 6 months of billing, your preferred position is 12 months
Mandatory clause in your playbook, absent from the contract
The acceptable liability cap, the minimum confidentiality period, the clause you never sign: everyone roughly knows, nobody can find it in black and white.
The client's or supplier's contract arrives on their paper. The lawyer rereads it in full to spot what departs from your usual practice.
Salespeople and buyers don't know how far they can concede. They escalate everything, or nothing, and Legal becomes the bottleneck.
A Pactolane playbook is your company's negotiation framework: for each type of clause, it describes four positions (preferred, acceptable, fallback, red line), with their criteria and a sample text.When a contract is analyzed with a playbook, each clause is matched to the closest position and the contract receives a score out of 100, weighted by the importance of each clause.
For each clause: a score, criteria written in plain language and a sample text, from the preferred position to the red line.
Position detected, exact text found in the contract, amounts, dates and durations extracted, recommendations, and a list of missing clauses.
When a clause falls into fallback or red line, a lawyer on your team reviews it, then accepts or rejects it with a comment. Every decision is kept.
Duplicate one of the playbooks provided (NDA, services agreement, subcontracting, SaaS license, DPA) or create your own: jurisdiction, contract type, industry.
Clause by clause: importance, mandatory or not, and for each position a score, criteria and a sample text. Then you publish.
When an incoming contract is imported, or as a step in an approval workflow that can block, warn or let it through depending on the score.
NDA, services agreement, subcontracting, SaaS license and DPA, read-only and duplicable to adapt them to your policy.
Settings (jurisdiction, contract type, industry), reorderable clauses, four positions per clause, draft then publication.
Each clause weighs according to its importance. The score ranges from “critical” to “excellent”, with a recommendation for each level.
A missing mandatory clause appears in the report. For a clause in fallback or red line, the report shows the better positions and their sample text.
Fallback and red-line positions go through a lawyer on your team, who accepts or rejects them with a comment.
In an approval workflow, playbook analysis can block, warn or let through based on a minimum score and missing clauses.
A legal playbook is a company's negotiation guide: for each important clause, it sets out the ideal position, what remains acceptable, the last-resort position and what you won't sign. In Pactolane, this guide becomes a structured framework, applied to contract analysis, instead of a document nobody reopens.
Pactolane reads the contract, identifies each clause and, for each clause in the playbook, determines the closest position (preferred, acceptable, fallback or red line). It then calculates an overall score out of 100, an average weighted by the importance of each clause, and produces a report: position detected, exact text found, amounts, dates and durations extracted, missing clauses and recommendations. The score ranges from “critical” (0 to 29) to “excellent” (90 to 100).
Pactolane provides five ready-to-use playbooks: non-disclosure agreement (NDA), services agreement, subcontracting, software or SaaS license, and data processing agreement (DPA). They are read-only, and you duplicate them to adapt them to your policy. You can also create your own playbooks, by jurisdiction, contract type and industry.
Writing a playbook in Pactolane requires no code: for each clause, you enter plain-language criteria and a sample text for each of the four positions, along with a score, an importance level and whether the clause is mandatory. Clauses can be reordered by drag and drop, and the playbook stays in draft until it is published. To draft your own contracts, your templates rely on the clause library.
In Pactolane, the decision rests with your lawyers: a user with the legal administrator role reviews the clause, accepts or rejects it with a comment, and this validation can adjust the score. The history of all validations is kept. The playbook prepares the decision; the legal judgment remains that of your team and your advisers. To prepare your fallback positions, see our explainer on fallback clauses and playbooks for your negotiators.
A Pactolane playbook can serve as a step in an approval workflow: you set a minimum score, the number of red-line clauses tolerated and the requirement for mandatory clauses, then choose what happens on failure (block, warn or continue). With the “block” option, the off-policy contract is stopped before it reaches the next approvers. Learn more about approval workflows.
Pactolane playbooks, standard and customizable, and playbook-based contract analysis (score, clause-by-clause report, legal validation, workflow step) are included from the Team plan (€149 per month excl. VAT, 7-day free trial). The Growth (€499 per month excl. VAT) and Scale (from €2,500 per month excl. VAT) plans add automatic AI analysis and PactAI, the assistant that answers your questions about your contracts. Full details are on our pricing page.
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