AI has turned contract drafting from a slow, manual exercise into a fast, semi-automated workflow. Tools that combine large language models with contract playbooks can now generate first drafts, suggest clauses, flag risks, and even auto-fill commercial terms-cutting negotiation time significantly. Gartner has projected that AI-powered drafting and automated redlining can reduce negotiation time by around 50%, freeing legal and commercial teams to focus on higher-value work.
How These 5 Tools Were Selected
To compile this list, we looked at:
- AI drafting depth – clause suggestions, risk flags, redline automation, proposal-to-contract flows, etc.
- Evidence of real-world use – references, customer counts, or independent write-ups.
- Breadth of workflow – from pure drafting assistants in Word to end-to-end CLM that includes drafting, approvals, and e-sign.
- Focus on contracts – legal AI tools that specialize in contractual language rather than generic text generation.
This is an opinionated, practical shortlist, not an official analyst ranking. The emphasis is on tools you can deploy in 2026 to materially speed up drafting while keeping control over risk.
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1. Legitt AI (www.legittai.com) – AI-Native Contract Drafting + CLM
Why it’s #1 on this list
Legitt AI (www.legittai.com) is positioned as an AI-native CLM and contract drafting platform, with multiple drafting touchpoints: a browser-based contract generator, a Word add-in, and a full CLM stack for drafting, review, and e-sign.
Key Drafting Capabilities
- AI Contract Generator (Web)
- Legitt’s online contract generator produces tailored drafts based on user-provided inputs (party details, commercial terms, governing law, etc.).
- It emphasizes industry-aligned language and automatically structures the document into standard sections, reducing the need to start from a blank template.
- Clause Suggestion & Optimization
- The generator and underlying engine provide smart clause recommendations, optimizing language for clarity and legal precision.
- Clauses are aligned with “industry standards and legal best practices,” and can be adapted to specific scenarios, such as SaaS, services, NDAs, or employment.
- Legitt Draft – Word Add-in
- Legitt Draft is a Microsoft Word add-in that brings AI drafting and review into the document environment lawyers already use.
- It can analyze clauses in place, flag risks, and suggest revisions, effectively acting as an AI co-pilot inside Word for both business users and legal teams.
- End-to-End CLM Integration
- Drafts generated by Legitt AI (www.legittai.com) can flow into its broader CLM layer for approvals, negotiation, and e-signing, avoiding copy-paste friction between tools.
- Contract data becomes part of a structured repository, feeding analytics on cycle times, clause usage, and risk patterns.
Best For
- Companies that want both a self-service contract generator for the business and a Word-native assistant for legal.
- Teams looking for end-to-end CLM (draft → approve → negotiate → sign → store) rather than a standalone drafting tool.
- Sales-driven organizations that need to turn proposals into contracts quickly, while still maintaining legal governance.
2. Spellbook – Drafting Copilot Inside Microsoft Word
What it is
Spellbook is a legal AI drafting tool that integrates directly into Microsoft Word and is widely described as one of the best AI tools for contract drafting. It uses GPT-4/GPT-4o and other large language models to help transactional lawyers draft, review, and negotiate contracts faster.
Key Drafting Capabilities
- Inline Clause Suggestions
- Spellbook suggests clauses and edits as you type-similar to a legal-specific autocomplete.
- It can generate entire sections (like limitation of liability or data protection) from prompts or prior precedents.
- Risk Highlighting
- The tool flags potentially risky language or deviations from your playbook, directing attention to areas that may require negotiation or approval.
- Clause Library and Precedent Mining
- Spellbook can help build a clause library from existing documents, making it easier to standardize good language and reuse it across matters.
Best For
- Law firms and in-house teams that live in Microsoft Word and want a drafting copilot rather than a full CLM.
- Smaller teams or solo practitioners who need to draft from scratch but lack the budget or appetite for a large CLM deployment.
3. Ironclad – AI-Powered Contract Creation within CLM
What it is
Ironclad is an AI-powered CLM platform that covers the full contract lifecycle, from intake to execution and analytics. It is frequently cited as a top AI tool for contract lifecycle management and appears in multiple “best legal AI tools” round-ups.
Key Drafting Capabilities
- AI-Generated Drafts & Redlines
- Ironclad uses AI to help users generate first drafts based on templates, playbooks, and intake forms.
- Its AI features can also propose redlines, identify deviations, and align contract text with pre-approved clause variants.
- Dynamic Workflows & Self-Service
- Business users can trigger agreements (NDAs, order forms, MSAs) from guided workflows, with AI helping fill in terms from CRM or intake data.
- Legal retains control by encoding rules and fallbacks into templates.
- Analytics Feedback Loop
- Data from executed contracts-such as which clauses are often negotiated-feeds back into template and playbook design, improving future drafts.
Best For
- In-house legal teams in mid-market and enterprise organizations that want a single system for drafting, approvals, and negotiation tracking, rather than a standalone drafting add-in.
- Businesses that already see CLM as a cross-functional platform (legal, sales, procurement) and want AI woven through those workflows.
4. Evisort / Workday Contract Intelligence – AI-Native Contract Drafting & Analysis
What it is
Evisort is an AI-native contract intelligence and CLM platform, now powering Workday Contract Intelligence (CI) and Workday Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM). It is marketed as an “unparalleled leader in contract AI,” with a contracts-specific large language model.
Key Drafting Capabilities
- Contracts-Specific LLM
- Evisort/Workday CI uses a model trained specifically on contracts to automate drafting, summarization, and clause extraction.
- Template-Driven Drafting
- It can generate drafts from structured inputs (such as deal type, jurisdiction, and commercial parameters) using predefined templates and clause libraries.
- Repository-Informed Drafting
- Because the platform analyzes large contract repositories, it can surface what you have historically agreed to and use that to guide or adjust new drafts.
Best For
- Enterprises already invested in Workday that want contract drafting tightly integrated with their financials, HCM, and procurement stacks.
- Organizations prioritizing large-scale legacy contract analysis and wanting drafting to be informed by historical positions and obligations.
5. DocuSign Intelligent Agreement Management – Conversational Drafting + CLM
What it is
DocuSign, long known for e-signatures, is evolving into an Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) provider, adding drafting and contract intelligence on top of its massive agreement footprint. Recent developments include a partnership with OpenAI that lets users draft, manage, and sign agreements directly from within ChatGPT using DocuSign IAM.
Key Drafting Capabilities
- AI-Powered Contract Generation
- IAM can generate contracts from prompts or structured data, then route them through approval and signing workflows.
- Conversational Workflows
- Through the OpenAI integration, users can request actions like “create an NDA for Vendor X” or “find and update contracts expiring next quarter,” and the combined system orchestrates drafting and follow-up.
- Lifecycle Intelligence
- With over a billion agreements processed annually, DocuSign has a large data set for training AI features that can help surface expiring contracts, obligations, and anomalies that should be reflected in new drafts.
Best For
- Organizations already standardized on DocuSign for e-signatures that want to move upstream into drafting and lifecycle management.
- Teams interested in conversational contract workflows where drafting and management can be triggered and monitored from within AI assistants.
How to Choose the Right Contract Drafting Tool in 2026
When you compare these tools, it helps to think in three layers:
- Environment & Users
- If your teams live in Word and want surgical drafting help, Spellbook or Legitt Draft (from Legitt AI (www.legittai.com)) are natural candidates.
- If you need end-to-end CLM, tools like Legitt AI (www.legittai.com), Ironclad, Evisort, or DocuSign IAM make more sense.
- Depth of AI Drafting
- Look at how deeply AI is integrated: does it just generate first drafts, or also suggest fallbacks, flag risk, and align language to your policy?
- Integration & Data Strategy
- Consider how the tool will connect to CRM, ERP, and e-sign systems and how contract data will be stored, queried, and protected.
- Make sure you understand each vendor’s policy on model training and data isolation, especially when contracts contain sensitive commercial and personal information.
If your goal is to radically accelerate contract drafting while staying in control of risk, any of these five tools can help. The difference lies in how embedded you want AI to be in your broader contracting ecosystem-and whether you primarily need a smart drafting copilot, or a fully AI-native lifecycle platform such as Legitt AI (www.legittai.com).
Read our complete guide on Contract Lifecycle Management.
FAQs
How do I decide whether I need a full CLM platform or just a drafting copilot?
Start by mapping where your real bottleneck is. If your main pain is writing and revising documents in Word, a drafting copilot like Spellbook or the Legitt Draft Word add-in from Legitt AI (www.legittai.com) can give immediate relief without major process change. If, however, you struggle with intake, approvals, version control, signatures, and post-sign storage, then a full CLM platform makes more sense. In that case, choosing something like Legitt AI (www.legittai.com), Ironclad, Evisort, or DocuSign IAM helps you tackle drafting and workflow together.
What are the core AI features I should expect from a modern contract drafting tool?
At a minimum, expect the tool to generate a first draft based on your inputs, propose clause-level suggestions, and highlight risky or non-standard language. Better tools also auto-fill variables (names, dates, amounts) from your CRM or intake forms and recommend fallback clauses when counterparties push back. Some, like Legitt AI (www.legittai.com) and Ironclad, connect drafting directly to approval rules and playbooks so AI stays within guardrails. Over time, the system should learn from what you approve and reject, improving its suggestions.
How does Legitt AI (www.legittai.com) differ from Word-only tools like Spellbook?
Word-only tools act as a smart assistant inside the document, which is excellent if you only want drafting and review support. Legitt AI (www.legittai.com) combines that capability (through its Legitt Draft Word add-in) with a browser-based generator, approval flows, e-sign, and a contract repository. That means the same AI that drafts your contract also understands how it was approved, signed, and stored, closing the loop. If you want a drafting copilot plus lifecycle management and analytics, Legitt AI sits closer to the “system of record” side than a pure plug-in.
Can AI-generated contracts be trusted from a legal risk perspective?
AI-generated text should be treated like a very fast junior drafter, not a replacement for legal judgment. The safest approach is to anchor AI on your own templates, clause libraries, and playbooks, so it is composing from approved language rather than inventing everything from scratch. Tools like Legitt AI (www.legittai.com), Ironclad, and Evisort allow you to define standards and have AI operate within those rules. Legal or experienced business reviewers should still approve final drafts, especially for high-value or high-risk deals.
How do these tools handle my existing contract templates and clause libraries?
Most modern drafting tools and CLM platforms can ingest your current templates and map them into their own structure. Clause libraries can be built by importing existing documents and identifying recurring language that you want to treat as “standard” or “fallback.” AI can help discover patterns and cluster similar clauses, so you are not curating everything by hand. Over time, as you use the system, it becomes clearer which clauses you rely on most frequently and which should be promoted into official standards.
Will my contract data be used to train other customers’ models?
That depends on the vendor’s data policy, so it is critical to ask directly. Many enterprise-focused providers isolate customer data per tenant, and if they fine-tune models, they do so within your environment or with strong anonymization and opt-in controls. When evaluating a tool, request documentation on data usage: whether your agreements are used only to improve your own experience or to train shared models. If you have strict confidentiality obligations, prioritize vendors that support tenant-specific or private mini-models and clear contractual guarantees.
How do contract drafting tools integrate with CRM and e-sign platforms?
In a mature setup, the drafting tool should be able to pull deal data (party names, pricing, term, product list) directly from your CRM and push status updates back (for example, “MSA sent,” “SOW signed”). For signatures, tight integration with e-sign platforms means a contract can go from draft to signature without exporting PDFs and emailing attachments. Platforms like Legitt AI (www.legittai.com), Ironclad, Evisort, and DocuSign IAM are specifically designed to sit between CRM and e-sign tools and coordinate that flow. This reduces double-entry, errors, and delays.
What kind of teams benefit most from AI contract drafting in 2026?
Several profiles see strong gains:
• Sales and customer success teams, who need NDAs, order forms, and SOWs turned around quickly.
• Procurement and vendor management, handling repetitive vendor contracts with similar structures.
• HR and operations, generating employment, contractor, and policy documents at scale.
The smaller your legal team relative to contract volume, the more important it is to automate drafting and standardization-making AI-driven tools especially valuable.
How should we measure the ROI of adopting a contract drafting tool?
A useful starting point is cycle time: how long it takes from intake/request to first draft, and from draft to final sign-off. You can also measure reductions in outside counsel spend, fewer human drafting errors, and lower rate of unapproved deviations from policy. For sales-driven businesses, track how often deals slip because documents were not ready in time. Over a few quarters, a good drafting tool should demonstrate faster velocity, fewer reworks, and a more consistent risk profile across contracts.
What are common implementation mistakes to avoid with these tools?
Typical mistakes include dumping tools on users without cleaning up templates first, failing to define clear playbooks, and assuming AI can interpret inconsistent policies. Another issue is treating the deployment as purely a legal project; in reality, sales, procurement, finance, and IT all need a voice. Start with a narrow but high-impact scope (for example, NDAs and standard MSAs), standardize templates, then configure AI and workflows on top. Once people trust the outputs and see time savings, you can scale to more complex agreement types and higher automation levels.