Overview Video
When Should I Build a Playbook?
Playbooks are one of four pathways Vera Engage supports for redlining contracts. Playbooks are the highest-effort option and are worth the investment only when you need repeatable results without per-contract expert oversight. If a lawyer or contracts professional will still review every redline, a lighter-weight pathway will usually get you strong results faster.Playbook Building: What to Expect
Building a playbook is a collaborative process between your team and the AI agent. The agent handles the heavy lifting (drafting rules, rewriting positions, and iterating on the rule table). Your subject matter experts (SMEs) provide the source materials, validate the positions, and guide refinements. The five phases below describe what to expect at each stage.1
Phase 1: Playbook Planning
What happensBefore gathering materials, decide whether a playbook is the right Vera Engage tool for the task and, if so, how many playbooks you need for the contract type. This upfront thinking prevents rework later.Do you need a playbook?Playbooks are most appropriate for high volume contracts with low reviewer discretion on redline responses, where your goal is automation or delegation — the same repeatable-results rationale described above under “When Should I Build a Playbook?”If you need redlines grounded in your context, but those redlines will be reviewed by a lawyer or a contracts professional, other Vera Engage capabilities may give you strong results with less upfront effort and faster results. These include:
- Attaching a human playbook, standard form, or prior redline to the chat and asking it to redline to align with the attached.
- Creating a review skill with redline guidance specific to the contract type and attaching context to that skill.
- The more time a run may take to process
- The more questions a user will have to answer before the playbook run starts
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Phase 2: Materials Gathering
What happensThe agent builds your playbook from the source materials you provide. Quality is significantly more important than quantity. The quality of those materials directly determines the quality of the initial playbook output. This phase is about identifying and assembling the best available sources before the build begins.Examples of source materials
- Negotiation guides or fallback matrices - shows your specific requirements and tiered positions (Word, Excel, or PDF; no specific organizational structure is required)
- Preferred redlines on a counterparty form - shows how you negotiate away from your standard
- Your standard form agreement - establishes your baseline positions
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Phase 3: Initial Build
What happensYou create a workspace and add the identified materials. The agent reads your source materials and asks you around half a dozen questions. Then you can walk away while the agent constructs an initial rule table, a structured set of playbook rules covering the key issues for the agreement type. Each rule captures the issue, your preferred position, acceptable fallbacks, and the reasoning behind the position.Your team’s roleWorkspace set up and the provision of context. The agent does the rest.Estimated effort
At the end of Phase 3, you will have a complete draft rule table ready for review.
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Phase 4: Strategy Assessment (Optional but Recommended)
What happensBefore testing the playbook against real contracts, it is worth pausing to validate that the positions in the rule table reflect your desired negotiating strategy, not just historical practice. Source materials often capture what your team has accepted, not necessarily what they should accept going forward. You can use our playbook strategy skill to help you navigate the questions and create materials for other stakeholder groups.Example questions to address
- Do the positions in the rule table reflect current business and legal strategy?
- Do the positions reflect general market practices?
- Have the right internal stakeholders signed off? (Legal, Finance, Procurement, Business)
- Are there positions that need to be updated to reflect recent market shifts, regulatory changes, or internal policy updates?
- Are fallback positions appropriately calibrated, not too aggressive, not too permissive?
- Are there issues missing from the rule table that your team regularly negotiates?
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Phase 5: Playbook Testing & Refinement
What happensThe playbook is tested against real contracts, ideally a representative sample of agreements your team actually reviews. The agent applies the playbook rules to each contract and flags issues. Your SMEs review the output, identify misses or misfires, and instruct the agent on corrections. The agent rewrites the affected rules and the cycle repeats until the playbook reaches the desired accuracy level.Factors that determine effort
Your team’s roleSMEs validate the agent’s output on test contracts, identify errors, and instruct the agent on corrections. The agent handles all rewriting; your team’s job is to review and direct, not to redraft. Expect two to four rounds of testing for most playbooks.Estimated effort
Effort is spread across multiple testing rounds and does not need to happen all at once.
Summary: Effort at a Glance
Step-by-Step Guide to Creating, Maintaining, and Running Playbooks
Creating Your Playbook
Creating a playbook walks through the steps below, from opening a workspace to sharing the finished playbook.1
Open the web app and create a new workspace
See Creating a workspace for how to name and set it up.
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Attach your existing materials
See Creating a workspace for what materials to attach.
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Type create playbook in the chat
The agent reviews your materials and asks a short set of questions to confirm context, including:
- Confirms your role and contract type (for example, vendor, SaaS subscription agreement)
- Paper type the playbook should support (first-party, counterparty, or both)
- Redline authorship (only if attached files include redlines) confirming which redlines represent your positions
- Discrepancy Precedence (if there is more than one type of file) which file should control if there are discrepancies in positions
- Redlining Style (do you prefer to work with counterparty language, push your preferred language, or somewhere in between)
- Comment preference (comment on every redline by default, or only where your materials specify)
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Let the agent build your playbook
Building a playbook requires significant reasoning by the agent and includes agentic self-audits. Agentic build time will depend on the size and volume of the materials you attached, but can take more than an hour. No need to sit and watch the agent work, continue with your day and check back in a while for a completed playbook. The completed playbook is called your Rule Table and is available as a workspace artifact.
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Test and refine
Run your playbook. Review the results. If the results don’t match your expectations, tell the chat to modify your rule table so that if it ran again the results would be X instead of the results you received.
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Share the playbook workspace
Share with your entire organization or with named individuals — see Sharing a workspace for what editors and viewers can each do.
Maintaining Your Playbook
New template? New negotiation positions? Revise your playbook at any time by simply chatting with the agent, or if you prefer editing fields directly.- Tell the agent
- Edit directly
In the workspace chat, describe the change. For example:
Change all my aggressiveness scores to 2.Update my playbook to reflect my new standard form.(after uploading the new standard form)Add a rule addressing [new issue].My company just decided we need to have an arbitration clause. Please add it to my playbook.
Running Your Playbook
You run playbooks from the Word Add-in.1
Open the contract
Open the document you want to review in Word.
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Open the Word Add-in
Launch Vera Engage inside Word.
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Attach the workspace to the chat
Click the paperclip, choose Add Workspace, and select the playbook workspace. Filter by the
playbook tag (applied automatically whenever you use create playbook) to find it quickly. Attach any other deal context you want the agent to consider, such as counterparty emails, an issues list, or approval emails.4
Kick off the playbook run
Kick off the playbook run by typing “run playbook”. You can also attach any additional context that may be relevant to the review of this turn of the contract - negotiation notes, escalation emails, RFP responses, term sheets, etc.
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Answer contextual questions to allow the agent to select the right fallbacks
If your playbook contains fallback (or variable) positions, the agent will assess the available context to determine if any of the available facts require the application of a fallback. For most companies, the types of facts that trigger variables are deal size, negotiation round, counterparty region, or the nature of the agreement such as the goods or services.For any question where the answer is not in the available context (your conversation, the document being reviewed, the Icertis platform data about the contract), the agent will ask the user for the answers before running the playbook.
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Review proposed redlines and comments
Each issue card shows the deviation score, the rule, the AI explanation for why the rule triggered (or did not), the proposed redlines, and the proposed comment. Apply on a rule-by-rule basis or use Apply All to accept everything at once.
Reading Playbook Results
The deviation score
A deviation score sits at the top of the results and tells you at a glance how far this contract is from your standard position. Alongside it you get the counts behind the number: how many high, medium, and low risk rules triggered, and how many came back compliant. The score updates in real time as you apply, concede, or skip rules, so it doubles as a progress indicator through a review.Risk color coding
Every triggered rule is color coded, and the results bar at the top summarizes the whole contract:
Click any color bar to filter and sort the results to that risk level. On a contract with dozens of triggered rules, this is the fastest way to work top-down by severity.
What is on an issue card
Actions on a rule
Concede is scoped to this contract. Conceding turns the rule off for future turns of this contract only. The rule still runs on every other agreement. Use it when you have decided to give way on a point in this negotiation, not when you want to change your position generally. For that, edit the rule.
When two rules conflict. If two rules collide (for example, one deleting a paragraph another is editing) the agent flags the conflict and leaves the bar solid-colored so you can navigate to it and resolve it manually.
After Apply All. The redlines are standard Word tracked changes. Accept or reject them individually in Word as you normally would.
FAQs
Sunsetting of Older Playbook Experience FAQ
Q: What happens with my existing playbooks in the old format? A: Your playbooks will still be available to run and edit in the near term. For a better run experience, we encourage you to migrate them to the agentic playbook experience. ____________ Q: How can I migrate my existing playbooks? A: It’s easy!- Create a new workspace in the Vera Engage webapp
- Type “migration” in the workspace chat.
- Answer a few questions — the agent will take it from there
Q: Can I still create new playbooks using the older experience. A: No. We no longer support the creation of rule-by-rule playbooks.