Inside Contract Review: Where the Hours Actually Go

Ask a general counsel where review time goes and you'll usually hear some version of 'negotiation' — the back-and-forth on the handful of terms that genuinely need a lawyer's judgment. That's the work legal teams want to spend their time on, and it's a reasonable guess about where the time actually goes. It's also, when we looked at hour-by-hour logs from teams piloting Queviny before onboarding, not where most of the time went.

What the hours actually looked like

Across the pilot teams that tracked their review activity in detail before switching tools, a consistent pattern showed up: the largest single block of time, typically somewhere between a third and half of total review hours, went to mechanical clause comparison and drafting — reading each clause against the playbook, typing out the same redline language used in the last five similar contracts, formatting the document for sending. Genuine negotiation — the calls, the judgment calls on where to hold firm — was consistently a smaller share than the teams themselves expected going in.

This gap between where people think their time goes and where it actually goes matters, because it points at the wrong fix. A team convinced their review process is slow because negotiations take too long will invest in better negotiation training, clearer escalation paths, tighter fallback positions. Useful things — but they don't touch the largest block of time, which is mechanical, not negotiated.

The second-largest block: status chasing

The next largest category surprised us more than the first. A meaningful share of review time — often in the range of a tenth of total hours — went to something that isn't really legal work at all: figuring out where a contract currently sits. Is it waiting on the counterparty, or waiting on an internal approver? Did procurement already sign off? In a lot of teams, this information lives in an email thread, a Slack message, or someone's head, and finding it costs real time, repeatedly, across a single contract's lifecycle.

“Almost half of review time goes to work that isn't negotiation at all — it's clause comparison, redline drafting, and simply figuring out where a contract already stands.”

What this means for where to actually invest

If mechanical comparison and status visibility together account for close to half of review hours, and genuine negotiation is a smaller share than most teams assume, the highest-leverage fix isn't better negotiation training — it's removing the mechanical work and making status visible in real time, so the hours that open up go toward the judgment calls teams actually want to be making.

• Automate comparison for the clause volume that doesn't need judgment, so review time concentrates on the deviations that do.
• Make approval status a shared, live view instead of a thing someone has to ask about — most status-chasing time disappears once the answer doesn't require asking a person.
• Draft redline rationale from the playbook automatically, so drafting time goes into refining language rather than reconstructing the reasoning from memory each time.

None of this is about closing contracts faster for its own sake, though that's usually the visible result. It's about a review process where the hours that remain are the ones legal teams actually signed up to do — negotiating the terms that matter, not chasing down whether procurement finished their sign-off.