How to hire a lawyer to review the contract you drafted with AI

Most people send the draft and nothing else. That is the expensive mistake.

The agreement you got back from Claude or ChatGPT reads well. It is organised, it uses the right words, and it covers what an agreement of that type usually covers. That is what makes it hard to review. A bad draft announces itself in the first paragraph. A plausible draft asks your lawyer to reconstruct, from the document alone, what deal you thought you were describing — and if the model guessed wrong about your business, the guess is now written in confident legal English and reads like a decision somebody made.

You are not unusual for having done this. Statistics Canada reports that 19.2% of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or deliver services in the year to the second quarter of 2026, up from 6.1% two years earlier. Among businesses with one to four employees the figure was 19.9% — the smallest firms are adopting at essentially the same rate as everyone else, and they are the ones least likely to have had a lawyer look at the template they replaced.

What to send the lawyer, including the part most people leave out

Send all of this in the first email. Every item you hold back becomes a question later, and questions are billable.

• The draft itself, in Word rather than PDF. A lawyer who cannot track changes will retype, and you will pay for the retyping.
• The prompts you used. This is the one people leave out, and it is the most useful thing in the package. The prompt is where you told the model what your deal was. If you described a two-year arrangement and the draft says three, the prompt shows whether that was the model's invention or your instruction. It also shows what you never mentioned — the parent company, the existing distributor, the outstanding loan — which is where the real exposure usually sits.
• Who the parties actually are. Exact legal names, jurisdiction of incorporation, and who signs. Models routinely produce agreements between trade names that do not exist as legal entities.
• What has already happened. Emails, a term sheet, a handshake, an invoice already paid. Something binding may already exist, and it changes what the document can safely say.
• The other side's version, if there is one, and whether you have already sent them yours.
• Your deadline and your budget. Both. A lawyer told "as soon as possible, whatever it costs" will price for the worst case.

One caution before you forward anything. If the draft contains someone else's confidential information, or you are bound by an NDA, pasting it into a public AI tool may already have been a problem — worth reading what you give away when you paste a contract into ChatGPT before you do it again.

How to ask for it: the words that get you a yes

The phrase to use is limited scope retainer. It is a defined term in Ontario, not a request for a favour. The Rules of Professional Conduct define it as the provision of legal services for part, but not all, of a client's legal matter, and the Law Society of Ontario's guidance on it is public. Rule 3.2-1A requires a lawyer taking one on to advise you honestly about the nature, extent and scope of what they can provide, and to confirm in writing, as soon as practicable, what services will be provided.

That written confirmation protects you as much as the lawyer. It is the document that says the review covered the indemnity and the termination clause and did not cover the tax treatment.

Something close to this works:

What a review should actually deliver

Ask for three things, and say so before the work starts.

On timing: a short commercial agreement is usually a two-to-five business day job, not a two-week one. If a lawyer cannot start for three weeks and you sign in ten days, you need to know that in the first exchange, not the second.

What it should cost, and why the AI draft may not save you money

Ask for a fixed fee, and ask for it in writing. Reviewing one document of known length is exactly the kind of work that can be priced in advance, and the lawyer who quotes you a number has told you something about how often they have done it.

Then ask the question almost nobody asks: is it cheaper for you to review mine or to start from your own precedent? Sometimes the honest answer is the second one. Reviewing an unfamiliar draft means reading every clause to work out whether it is standard, deliberate, or a hallucination, and that can take longer than producing a document the lawyer already knows is sound. You are entitled to the comparison and to make the choice yourself.

If the lawyer bills hourly, one thing is worth knowing. The Law Society of Ontario's white paper on licensee use of generative AI (April 2024) is direct about it: "If a licensee is billing by the hour, they can only charge for the time actually spent by the licensee on the file, even if a generative AI tool has made the task much more efficient." A lawyer who uses AI to speed up your review may not bill you for the hours it would have taken without it.

What to do if the lawyer is resistant

Resistance is common and it is usually reasonable. Three of the four kinds have an answer.

There is a reason for the wariness in that last row. In Zhang v. Chen, 2024 BCSC 285, the British Columbia Supreme Court ordered a lawyer to personally pay costs after he filed material citing cases ChatGPT had invented. Generative AI, the court said, "is still no substitute for the professional expertise that the justice system requires of lawyers." Caution about unverified AI output is well founded. Refusing to look at a document a client has already written is a different thing.

So ask the question in the other direction: do you use AI in your own practice, and how do you verify it? A lawyer who says "never" and a lawyer who cannot describe a verification step are telling you different things, and neither answer is the reassuring one.

Five questions before you retain anyone

• Is this a fixed fee, and what does it include?
• What will you specifically not be reviewing?
• Who does the work — you, or someone else at the firm?
• When will I have it, and what do you need from me to hit that date?
• Do you use AI in your own drafting, and how do you check it?

Five things to fix yourself first

These take twenty minutes and reduce what you are paying someone else to catch.

• Legal names. "Acme" is not a party. "Acme Holdings Inc." is. Check both sides against the corporate registry.
• Governing law and forum. Models default to New York or Delaware with some regularity. If you are in Ontario and your customer is in Ontario, say so.
• Defined terms. Search the document for each capitalised term and confirm it is defined once and used consistently. AI drafts frequently define "Services" and then refer to "the Work."
• Dates and numbers. Term, notice periods, payment days, dollar figures. Read them against what you actually agreed.
• Signature blocks and authority. Whoever signs needs the authority to bind the company, and the block should say the capacity they sign in.

There is a longer version of that list in our guide to reviewing an AI-drafted contract, and a separate discussion of whether an AI-drafted contract is binding in Canada — it usually is, which is the problem.

The thing to hold on to

The draft is not the deal. It is a very fluent guess at what your deal might be, made by something that has never met your customer, does not know that your last supplier walked away owing you money, and cannot be asked what it was thinking. You can. That is the whole of what you are buying, and it is worth asking for by name.

I do this work at a fixed fee — see how a lawyer's review of an AI-drafted document works. If you would rather understand the trade-off first, AI does what you ask; a lawyer finds what you did not covers where the judgment actually sits.