Contracts, made intelligent
AI-powered risk detection in a contract repository designed for non-lawyers.
Company
Medius
Year
2025
Role
Designer
Scope
AI/UX
Information Architecture
Enterprise SaaS
The problem
Contracts lived everywhere — email threads, shared drives, scattered spreadsheets — and nobody had a complete picture. Renewals were tracked in personal calendars. High-risk clauses went unread because reading a 40-page contract before every renewal was not realistic.
- Fragmented storage — no single source of truth.
- No deadline monitoring — renewals and expirations tracked manually.
- Opaque language — clauses like "unilateral price adjustment" buried in legal text.
The approach
The repository design prioritised scanability: at a glance, a procurement manager should see expiry status, contract value, and risk level. AI analysis runs on upload and surfaces plain-English summaries of flagged clauses — not a dump of raw legal text.
- Expiry timeline view as the default — no searching for what's expiring next.
- AI insight card: "Clause 8.3 grants the supplier unilateral price adjustment rights — flagged as high risk."
- Plain English toggle: AI rewrites the clause in accessible language on demand.
Key design decisions
Risk as a status, not a score
Early prototypes showed a numerical risk score (0–100). User testing showed people ignored it — the number felt arbitrary. The final design uses three categorical statuses: Active, Expiring (within 30 days), and Risk Flagged. Each maps to a recognisable colour and drives clear action.
AI insight as a summary, not an alert
Risk clauses are surfaced as a contextual card below the contract entry — not as a notification or a modal interruption. Users can expand the card to read the original clause text alongside the AI summary. This kept the experience calm and scannable.
One view for all user groups
Procurement managers, legal reviewers, and finance analysts all needed different depths. Instead of building separate views, the repository uses progressive disclosure: the list view works for quick scanning; clicking into a contract reveals the full AI analysis and clause breakdown.
Outcome
A contract repository that consolidates fragmented sources and surfaces risk before renewal decisions. AI clause detection became the most-requested feature in post-launch feedback.
4
User groups served from one view
AI
Risk clauses auto-detected
1
Source of truth consolidated