ContractHero vs Pactly: how they compare in 2026
A German company organizing costs, deadlines and entities may prefer ContractHero's contract register and source linked assistant. Pactly serves corporate legal teams that also need playbook redlining and structured portfolio review. Both expose contract information through a read only MCP connection. On the access question, AI Legal Index identifies ContractHero's explicit inheritance of each user's permissions as a useful distinction from Pactly's company scoped MCP tool description. Their built in analysis also differs: ContractHero's assistant answers from the open contract, while Pactly Projects applies a table of questions across many files. Pactly's versioned positions and tracked edits support negotiation; ContractHero emphasizes extracted fields, renewal management and controlled access to the agreement collection. Neither MCP connection can create, edit or delete contracts.
At a glance
All 15 axes, side by side
The same grid applied to every vendor in the index, graded from public sources. Hover a grade to see what the letter means on that axis.
AI Centrality
How much of the product is actually AI. Whether the machine learning is the mechanism the buyer is paying for or a feature layered onto conventional software, and whether the vendor is specific about which is which.
ContractHero's AI reads each uploaded contract and fills the data the rest of the product runs on. After OCR and layout detection, it splits the document into chunks, finds the passages that match each field's prompt and writes the value, shaped by an optional instruction for filters and special cases. Fields cover parties, contract values, clauses and deadlines, and customers can write their own prompts per field and contract type, with a prompt assistant and a retrigger to run the analysis again. The same models write summaries, suggest a category from the existing ones, and power the assistant and the MCP connector. Deadline tracking, reminders, approval rules, templates, signatures and reports run on that data, and users can enter or correct any field by hand. ContractHero claims the analysis cuts review time per contract by up to 80 percent.
Models identify clauses and concepts for playbook review, generate proposed revisions and extract values across contract collections. Assist adds questions about a contract's text and history, with proposed edits and comments in Word. Projects applies the same questions to many agreements and returns a structured table with reasoning and source passages. These are core analysis functions alongside the conventional platform: questionnaires generate approved templates, workflows route approvals, signatures execute agreements and reminders track renewals. Those administrative features do not depend on generative output. Projects is available separately, while Growth and Ultimate include it within an unspecified fair use allowance.
Citation Accuracy and Hallucination Disclosure
Whether the vendor publishes measured accuracy on citations and assertions, grounds output to primary sources, and says plainly what its system does when it does not know. Legal has a documented public record of fabricated citations reaching filed briefs, so an untested claim of accuracy is not evidence.
Every field the AI fills carries a purple marker and a Jump to Source link that opens the contract at the passage the value came from. Tables are highlighted as a whole, images in scans show the nearest text, and where several passages match, the most likely one is marked. The assistant answers only from the contract's own data with source links, works without internet access, and does not answer what the contract does not say. ContractHero's help center explains the method: OCR, layout detection, chunking and similarity matching on the field prompt. It also notes that the models were trained mostly on English data, so English prompts are often the most reliable, and that summaries are reliable mainly in German and English. ContractHero gives no accuracy or error rate. The help center warns that poor scans reduce accuracy and that bulk verification misses errors, and recommends checking amounts and deadlines field by field.
Projects connects an extracted value to reasoning, a quoted source passage and a document view that highlights the relevant text. Users can correct a value, preserve the original AI extraction and mark a result as verified. The guidance names concrete failure modes, including confusion between effective and commencement dates, loss of qualifiers in compound liability caps and missing values in drafts with placeholders. Word review also exposes the clauses behind each playbook assessment. No reproducible benchmark or measured error rate accompanies these mechanisms. The terms expressly warn that AI answers can be incomplete or wrong and require checking against the source.
Autonomy and Oversight Model
What the system decides on its own, what a lawyer must approve, and whether the vendor documents where the review point sits. A tool that drafts under review and a tool that files without one are different products and different risks.
ContractHero separates what the AI fills from what a person confirms. AI values stay marked with a purple sparkle until a user verifies them, field by field or all at once, and a counter such as 6 of 7 verified shows what is still open. The assistant is read only and cannot change fields or tasks. The MCP connector only reads and respects every existing permission, and AI categorization chooses among existing categories and never overwrites a manual choice. ContractHero's EU AI Act page states that legal and financial decisions are always made by a person, not the AI, and that AI is labeled wherever it is used. The help center tells users to check the original or involve the legal department before acting on a summary in a legal decision. Deleting a contract can be made subject to an approval rule, and a write permission level allows editing without deletion.
Assist never applies a contract edit or comment silently: proposed changes require acceptance and enter Word as tracked changes. A reviewer can reject, revise or copy the proposal, and a support message is not sent without the user's choice. Playbook results can be Uncertain, returning the decision to a human; accepted deviations carry a written justification. Projects preserves corrected and verified values during reruns and identifies outdated results when a column question changes. The external MCP connection is read only and cannot create, modify, delete or send signature requests. Standalone Word generation remains described as an upcoming release rather than an existing unrestricted action.
Operational and Outcome Evidence
Named, dated evidence that the product works in production at real firms or legal departments. Case studies with figures and identified customers count. Unattributed testimonials and launch announcements do not.
ContractHero names customers with figures, without dates. Schüttflix legal counsel Lukas Berg says the legal team saves about 20 percent of its working time after four years of use. NUMA Group, with more than 120 hotels in 14 countries, migrated more than 5,000 contracts and reports €100,000 saved in its first year. It puts potential savings at €600,000 a year, with its senior associate general counsel quoted. Stadtwerke Leonberg reports €80,000 a year, hhpberlin €100,000 in its first year and Everphone more than 100 hours a year, and Wire says finding a contract went from 10 to 15 minutes to seconds. Logos include Audi, Eurowings, ZDF, MB Leasing, Dorint and Stadtwerke Stuttgart. None of the 16 success stories gives a date or says how its figures were measured. The company states more than 400 customers and over a million contracts under management.
A September 2022 case study identifies Virtuos and its Senior Legal Counsel, Johnathan Yong, and describes an NDA process before and after adopting Pactly. Requests previously took several days or sometimes a week across Word, shared drives and email. Following template questionnaires, legal review and DocuSign execution, reported median finalization fell to two hours and median completion of a signed agreement to twelve hours. Yong describes feedback more than two months after implementation. The account explains the workflow change and measured contract type, although it does not provide the sample size. It measures contract automation rather than the accuracy of today's generative review features.
Privilege and Confidentiality Posture
How client confidences are handled: attorney client privilege and work product treatment, segregation of one client matter from another, whether client data trains any model, and what the vendor commits to in writing rather than in marketing.
The Starter agreement limits rights in customer content to what is strictly necessary to deliver the contracted service, with those rights ending at termination. Its confidentiality duty survives the agreement. The separate data processing agreement restricts personal data processing to customer instructions and binds authorized staff to confidentiality. ContractHero's AI policy separately states that customer contracts train neither its own models nor third party models. The current agreements do not express that promise as a specific model training prohibition. Assistant conversations are private to each user, including from account administrators. Contract permissions and user scoped MCP access limit visibility, but treatment of attorney privilege and work product remains unspecified.
The service agreement protects nonpublic customer data as confidential information and preserves customer ownership. Its improvement license nevertheless permits analysis of service information involving customer data during the term and use of anonymized aggregate customer data for lawful business purposes afterward. Public marketing says contracts never train AI models, without the same express restriction in the agreement. Sensitive groups can hide contracts from nonmember administrators, but deliberate sharing and project membership can widen access. The provider list explains where contract data travels. No specific attorney client privilege, work product or accidental disclosure protection is stated for lawyers using these features.
UPL and Professional Responsibility Posture
Whether the vendor is clear that it supplies a tool rather than legal advice, who its audience is, and how it addresses unauthorized practice of law, competence and supervision duties, and jurisdiction limits. ABA Formal Opinion 512 is the reference point. Where the advice line is not the duty a product raises, the axis is read through the nearest professional duty it does raise: judicial conduct rules and the reviewing duty for products sold only to courts, and the duty to bill for time actually spent for products that draft time entries.
ContractHero's terms say it provides no legal advice (keine Rechtsberatung) and does not check contract content for accuracy or completeness. The values the AI reads are shown to the customer to review, and the customer must correct wrong ones or report them. The assistant help article says the assistant explains what a contract says and is not legal advice, leaving the legal assessment with the user. The EU AI Act page says legal decisions are made by a person. ContractHero is sold to legal departments alongside finance, procurement and management, and its legal page says legal departments keep control over content and decisions. ContractHero's material does not mention the German Legal Services Act (Rechtsdienstleistungsgesetz), the duties of in house lawyers, or limits by jurisdiction.
Pactly's agreement says the company is not a law firm, use creates no attorney client relationship and the service does not solicit legal advice. It separately warns that AI answers may be wrong and makes the customer responsible for comparison with the source. Product guidance describes the reviewer accepting edits and resolving uncertain playbook findings, and the company explicitly rejects a fully automatic robot lawyer role. Corporate legal departments are its principal audience, with business users working through forms and approvals. The material does not map the controls to named bar guidance or publish jurisdiction specific professional responsibility limits.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behavior: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
ContractHero has assessed its AI features against the EU AI Act and classifies contract analysis outside the high risk and prohibited categories of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689. It treats the underlying models as general purpose AI. AI features must carry labels, and legal and financial decisions remain with a person. The fuller assessment is available through the product's security portal. Extracted values carry a purple marker until someone verifies them. OCR, document layout and language affect extraction, with weaker results on poor scans and in languages other than German and English. A named owner for model behavior, release testing process and evaluation results are unspecified. The information security certificate does not establish certification of an AI management system.
Published AI guidance explains how customers verify results, handle uncertain findings and correct extraction mistakes. Release notes describe feature changes, and security materials identify a data protection officer and engineering responsibilities for incidents. These do not establish an AI governance program with an accountable model owner, release testing criteria or results on uneven behavior across languages, populations or contract categories. Positive and negative playbook examples help customers configure review, rather than disclose Pactly's own evaluation program. No formal bias assessment, model card or governance framework accompanies the descriptions of Assist, Projects and playbook review.
AI Safety and Data Stewardship
Retention, deletion, access control, and what happens to prompts and documents after they are processed. Whether the vendor states its subprocessors and its incident practice, or leaves the buyer to assume.
Starter customers receive 30 days of read access after termination to export content, with one requested 30 day extension. Content is then deleted and backup copies expire within a cycle of at most 30 days; statutory accounting records remain longer. The DPA requires deletion evidence on request, access controls, tenant separation and prompt notice of security incidents. Its processor schedule names AWS, Google Gemini, Azure, Modal Labs, Qdrant and other suppliers with European Union locations. Supplier changes carry advance notice and objection rights. Assistant chats can be deleted by their user, but their default duration and provider request retention are unspecified. The general content lifecycle should therefore be distinguished from an exact AI history retention period.
Pactly describes encrypted storage and transport, monitoring, backups, vulnerability testing and separate production and test environments. Administrators can require two factor authentication, and high criticality incidents trigger notice to affected customers or all customers when the affected group cannot be identified. A public supplier register details processing functions and regions with advance change notice. The terms provide sixty days to retrieve data after termination, followed by requested deletion with an anonymized aggregate exception. Assist attachments expire after seven days, but ordinary chat history, backup deletion and underlying AI provider retention lack a complete fixed schedule. No definite breach notification deadline is stated.
AI Liability and Recourse
What the vendor stands behind contractually when its output is wrong. Indemnities, caps, carve outs, insurance, and whether any of it is published or only reachable through a negotiated agreement.
ContractHero's Starter agreement caps ordinary liability at fees paid during the preceding 12 months, with exceptions for intent, gross negligence, bodily injury, guarantees and product liability. Data loss recovery is limited by the backups the customer should have kept. Statutory warranty rights remain subject to reporting defects and allowing a remedy, but Starter has no availability guarantee or promise of immutable archival storage. The customer must inspect imported data and report errors; ContractHero gives no legal advice or output accuracy warranty. The customer's indemnity concerns unlawful content and misuse, with a vendor misconduct exception. Individually negotiated plans have their own terms, and the separate DPA also contains liability provisions.
The service agreement includes an indemnity for third party claims involving patents, copyright or trade secrets infringed by the service, subject to stated exclusions and control of the defense. Available remedies include replacement, modification, a license or termination with unused fees returned. General liability is capped at fees paid in the preceding twelve months and excludes data inaccuracies and several categories of loss. AI answers are expressly described as potentially incomplete or wrong, with verification assigned to the customer. There is no separate output accuracy warranty or AI insurance promise. Availability remedies have separate claim deadlines and exclude beta features.
Practice Systems Integration Depth
How deeply the product reaches into the systems legal work already lives in: document management such as iManage and NetDocuments, Word and Outlook, contract lifecycle management, matter management, e-billing, and court filing systems.
ContractHero's REST API and webhooks have an OpenAPI reference and require an access token, with access from the Professional plan. The MCP connector, an add on, gives Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini read only access to contract data under each user's permissions, and administrators can switch it on or off for the organization. The Word add in saves a finished document from Word into ContractHero as a PDF, where the AI analysis runs. Customers set up HubSpot, Power BI, email import and a read only iCal feed for Outlook, Google and Apple calendars themselves, and the Slack app sends notifications and takes slash commands. SharePoint, OneDrive and DocuSign connect on request. The integrations page also calls SAP, DATEV, Salesforce, Dynamics, Personio and Lucanet native, without describing what any of them moves.
The Word plugin uploads an agreement for playbook review, displays matched clauses and proposed fixes, inserts approved language as tracked changes and records review decisions between rounds. The MCP connection exposes eight read only tools for contract text, metadata, parties, playbooks, clauses and account information to external clients such as Claude and Cursor. Public instructions specify API key or OAuth authentication, administrator consent, filters, returned fields and request limits. Separate APIs can generate contracts from templates and support webhooks. DocuSign and Adobe Sign support execution, while the Ultimate plan's SharePoint connection is described as backup only rather than general document synchronization.
Deployment Model and Data Residency
Where the software runs and where the data sits. Multi tenant cloud, single tenant, private deployment, on premises, and whether region of residence is a published option or an enterprise conversation.
ContractHero operates as a cloud service and describes storage, processing and archiving in Frankfurt. Enterprise customers can direct backups to their own server or bucket. The current DPA assigns European Union server locations to AWS, Gemini, Azure, Modal Labs, Qdrant and the other processors, without mapping each AI function to a particular country or facility. That supplier schedule is broader than the general Germany only hosting statement. The assistant inside ContractHero and an external assistant using MCP also create different processing paths: permissions carry through the connector, but the connected assistant's own service processes the retrieved information. A private cloud or on premises installation is not part of the stated offering.
Core hosting, compute and Bedrock inference use AWS in Singapore by default, with Malaysia for specified Malaysian customers. Structured data in MongoDB Atlas remains in Singapore for all customers. The supplier table separately identifies United States processing for document conversion, OCR, Cerebras inference and fallback Anthropic or OpenAI services, plus Langfuse monitoring in Germany and Cloudflare's global edge. Those routes make regional hosting different from exclusive regional processing. The SLA also recognizes fully managed private deployments, without a standard public price for them. Singapore and Malaysia have separate service entry points, and the published provider map identifies functions as well as locations.
Security Certifications and Trust Center
Independent attestation a buyer can pull without a sales call: SOC 2, ISO 27001, penetration test summaries, a trust center with current reports and named scope rather than a badge image.
Proks Certification GmbH in Düsseldorf issued ContractHero's ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certificate DE-IS-20240084 for a B2B SaaS platform specializing in contract management. The certificate runs from March 21, 2024 to March 20, 2027 and was reissued on February 9, 2026 against a Statement of Applicability dated January 20, 2026. This covers ContractHero's information security management system, rather than merely a hosting provider's controls. The company describes annual certification audits and external penetration tests twice yearly. Its security portal also contains an AI Act assessment. ISO 27017, ISO 27018 and CSA STAR references concern the hosting infrastructure and should be distinguished from ContractHero's own certificate.
Pactly identifies ISO 27001 certification in its product, pricing and trust materials and offers its certificate, security whitepaper and penetration test results on request. The public trust FAQ describes Amazon's certified data centers when explaining ISO coverage, so infrastructure attestations need to be distinguished from Pactly's own claim. No openly supplied certificate names its current auditor, validity period and exact company scope. SOC, PCI and FISMA references in the infrastructure section concern AWS rather than a separate Pactly audit. Security practices include vulnerability scans, access logging, staff training and incident response, without resolving that certification scope question.
Model Supply Chain Disclosure
Which models sit underneath, whose they are, where they run, and whether the vendor commits to telling customers when that changes. A legal buyer inherits every dependency it cannot see.
The current DPA names Google Ireland for Gemini and Microsoft Azure for language model processing, together with Modal Labs for AI inference infrastructure and Qdrant for the vector database. Each has a European Union server location in the processor schedule. This identifies providers more precisely than the older help article, which added Modal and Qdrant without naming the language models. Model versions and the allocation of individual features between Gemini and Azure remain unspecified. Processor changes carry advance notice and objection rights, but an equivalent commitment for every model version change is absent. External MCP assistants are chosen by the customer and create a separate model relationship.
Pactly names AWS Bedrock for core inference, Cerebras for tasks requiring low latency, and Anthropic and OpenAI as fallback providers when Bedrock is unavailable. The supplier register identifies processing locations and also lists Langfuse for AI monitoring. Customers can subscribe to at least thirty days' written notice before a new subprocessor is engaged and raise an objection during that period. Exact production model families and versions are not supplied for each feature, nor is there a promise to notify every model version change within an existing provider. External MCP clients bring their own model relationship in addition to Pactly's built in AI.
Commercial Transparency
Whether a buyer can learn what this costs without entering a sales process: published rates, the unit being charged, what sits behind an enterprise tier, and what implementation adds.
Essential covers 500 contracts and five users, with a stated starting price of €390 monthly and annual advance billing as the usual arrangement. Professional and Enterprise require quotes and add more users, unlimited contracts and integration or access features. The separate self service Starter agreement covers 80 active contracts and three users at the checkout price; its terms cannot automatically be applied to an Essential quote. Starter excludes setup services, runs for 12 months and requires three months' cancellation notice. Its seven day trial ends without automatic payment. The help guidance for negotiated plans instead says trials are exceptional. MCP access, eIDAS QES signatures and some configuration options cost extra.
Standalone Projects starts at $69 a month for one user, fifty documents and 250 monthly runs, or $690 annually with 3,000 runs available immediately. Larger packages, additional documents and extra runs have published charges. The wider CLM starts at $99 per user monthly on an annual plan; Growth is $139 with five users minimum and Ultimate $179 with ten. Their monthly AI review allowances are ten, fifty and one hundred respectively. Growth and Ultimate include Projects under fair use without a numerical allowance. Enterprise, migration and some implementation services require a quote. Projects has a fourteen day trial, while the CLM trial lasts thirty days.
Firm and Practice Coverage
Who the product is actually built for. AmLaw, midlaw, small firm and solo, in house departments, government and courts, and which practice areas are supported rather than merely claimed.
ContractHero is built for the German Mittelstand and sells across Germany, Austria and Switzerland to mid sized companies and groups with several legal entities. Its home page addresses management, legal and compliance, finance, procurement and IT, with a dedicated page for legal departments. The industries it names include manufacturing, energy, healthcare, SaaS, tourism, real estate, retail and municipal utilities. Use cases include buy and build, DORA, NIS2, holdings, due diligence and audits. The help center states several limits. AI summaries work on PDFs and are reliable mainly in German and English, and extraction covers more than 30 languages with eight OCR script packs. Multi entity groups are part of Enterprise, and permissions apply per contract, not per field. The help center is in German only, and law firm use is not covered anywhere.
Pactly primarily serves corporate legal departments, including solo counsel and small teams across Southeast Asia and other Asia Pacific markets. Larger organizations can configure approval routes, business intake and administrator controls. Supported examples include NDAs, services, procurement, leases, employment and software licenses; Projects extends analysis to loan agreements, insurance and related portfolios. Sales, HR, finance and procurement can participate without turning the product into a consumer legal advice service. The company explicitly describes most customers as internal legal departments rather than firms. No measured language coverage or comprehensive jurisdiction matrix defines where AI interpretation is most reliable.
The 12 legal signals, side by side
Recorded rather than graded. These are the questions a practitioner has to answer before a tool touches a client matter, and the answers are taken from public material only.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
The current Starter agreement grants rights in customer content only as strictly necessary to provide the service, and those rights expire at termination. The DPA confines personal data use to the customer's instructions. Neither agreement expressly names a model training ban. ContractHero's separate AI policy promises that customer contracts train neither its own models nor those of third parties. That policy is more explicit about training than the contract language.
Named processors include Gemini and Azure, whose individual model arrangements are not included in the customer agreement.
The agreement permits analysis of service information involving customer data during the subscription for improvement and development. It also allows anonymized customer data to enter aggregate datasets used for lawful business purposes during and after the term, with safeguards against reidentification. Marketing separately promises that contracts never train AI models. The published agreement does not repeat that prohibition or exclude model improvement from its permission.
This records the contractual scope, not a claim that Pactly actually feeds every raw agreement into a shared training process.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
During the subscription, users can delete their own private assistant conversations and manage stored contracts. Starter termination leaves 30 calendar days of read access for export, extendable once by another 30 days on request. Content is then deleted, with backup copies removed within a cycle of at most 30 days. The DPA also permits return or deletion of personal data and backups, with deletion confirmation available on request.
Statutory accounting records have separate retention. Default assistant history duration and processor request storage remain unspecified.
Contract data remains retrievable for sixty days after termination. The standard terms then provide deletion on written request, excluding anonymized data already combined into aggregate datasets; online plans may delete after the same access window. Assist attachments expire after seven days, but a complete schedule for normal chat history, backups and provider copies is absent. The upcoming standalone Word generation description gives a thirty day file expiry, which should not be treated as the lifetime of all current AI outputs or contracts saved to the repository.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
ContractHero keeps its own permission model, documented in its help center. A standard model and a rule based model (APC, from the Professional plan) control which users see which contracts, and permissions apply per contract, so anyone who can see a contract sees all its fields. A write level allows editing without deletion, multi entity groups are handled as teams on the Enterprise plan, and assistant chats are private even from administrators.
Access delegation lets an outside legal team see only defined contract types, with ContractHero's own example of an external legal department reviewing NDAs and employment contracts. The MCP connector only reads and follows every existing permission. The change log cannot be edited, though read and download events are not consistently logged in it.
Pactly uses its own groups and roles rather than inheriting a document management system's matter walls. Sensitive groups hide contracts even from nonmember administrators, but an authorized person can deliberately share a contract outside the group. Projects creates another boundary: every project member sees all present and future project documents, even when the normal repository link is unavailable. Administrators can see all projects.
This is a described access model with important widening rules, not a promise that an original contract restriction automatically follows every AI analysis surface.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
The DPA requires ContractHero to inform the customer before additional processing required by European Union or member state law. It also requires prompt information about security incidents and data protection authority inspections. These obligations concern personal data processed on the customer's behalf. The Starter agreement separately permits disclosures required by law, court order or administrative decision under its confidentiality clause, without adding an equivalent general notice promise there. A transparency report and treatment of requests under other countries' laws are unspecified.
The service agreement incorporates Pactly's law enforcement request policy for compelled disclosure of customer data. That policy requires evaluation of governmental requests and notification to the customer where legally permitted, allowing an opportunity to seek protective measures. It applies to hosted and fully managed deployments, while excluding self hosted or customer managed solutions. Foreign authorities are directed through applicable legal and diplomatic channels.
No report of request volumes or outcomes accompanies this commitment, and the general privacy notice's legal disclosure permissions do not replace the more specific customer data policy.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
ContractHero extracts fields from customer contracts and answers questions from the agreement that is open. The built in assistant does not add outside legal sources or browse for legislation and cases. Customers supply field prompts, contract types and their own templates or clauses. Gemini and Azure appear in the current processor schedule, but that provider list does not identify the models' pretraining sources or licenses. The product's source links point back to uploaded agreements rather than a licensed legal research collection.
The analysis context is the customer's agreements, playbooks, approved clauses and related files. Projects reads each row's main contract and supporting amendments or schedules; Word review uses configured positions and fallback language. These are customer supplied materials rather than a catalog of primary law or licensed legal commentary. Pactly does not name an external research corpus, describe the source rights behind general model knowledge or supply an update process for legislation and case law. The public subprocessor list identifies processing suppliers, not a legal content licensing arrangement.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
ContractHero manages and reads contracts and does not cite case law or legislation, so a citator sits outside the product. Its clause library and templates are maintained by the customer with versioning and comparison, and ContractHero describes no way of flagging a clause after a change in the law. The calculated last possible notice date is a formula of contract end minus notice period, fed by the customer's own fields.
The home page pitches DORA and NIS2 audits as use cases, and ContractHero does not describe how the product follows changes to those regimes.
A source passage in Projects establishes where a contract value came from, and playbook review identifies the agreement language relevant to a configured rule. Neither function determines whether a case remains good law or legislation has changed. No licensed citator, subsequent history service or independent treatment signal is described. The legal team maintains its own clause positions and decides whether they remain appropriate.
Contract source highlighting and a verified cell marker therefore support review of supplied material without establishing the continuing validity of an external legal proposition.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
The assistant answers only from the open contract, and ContractHero states that what is not in the contract is not answered. Off topic questions get a fixed reply saying the assistant only helps with the customer's own data. Extracted values carry a source link and stay marked until a person verifies them, and where several passages match, Jump to Source marks the most likely one. AI categorization picks only from the customer's existing categories and leaves a manual choice untouched.
No confidence measure is shown for a field, and the help center does not say what extraction writes when a value is absent from the contract.
Playbook review includes an Uncertain result when a clause cannot be conclusively assessed, directing a person to decide. Each position also defines what happens when no relevant clause is found: compliant, not compliant or uncertain, according to the customer's chosen rule. Projects treats placeholders such as an unfilled name as not found and explains common interpretation failures. These are described negative and uncertainty states rather than a general guarantee of refusal. A wrong configuration of the absent clause rule can still produce a misleading result.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
The AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, which records court decisions worldwide that address hallucinated AI content and the tool involved where known, has no entry naming ContractHero. ContractHero stores and reads contracts for companies rather than producing court filings, so its output does not ordinarily reach a brief. Its assistant answers only from the contract that is open.
Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database contained no entry naming Pactly on October 16, 2026. The database concerns reported court decisions involving fabricated AI material and does not capture every private error in contract analysis. Pactly principally supports corporate agreements rather than preparation of court authorities, which limits what that incident record can say about its usual work. Its terms independently warn that AI answers may be incomplete or incorrect. No named court incident is therefore a limited reporting observation, not a validation of model accuracy.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
ContractHero's terms say it provides no legal advice and does not check contract content for accuracy or completeness. The assistant help article says the assistant is not legal advice and leaves the legal assessment with the user, and the EU AI Act page keeps legal decisions with a person. Its legal department page says legal teams keep control over content and decisions. No professional conduct guidance is named, and neither the German Legal Services Act nor the rules for admitted in house lawyers (Syndikusrechtsanwälte) are mentioned.
Pactly explains that it is not a law firm and requires people to verify AI answers against source text. Its review guidance describes accepting tracked edits, recording deviations and resolving uncertain results. These are practical controls for legal work, but the materials do not map them to a named professional ethics opinion, bar rule or regulator's jurisdiction specific AI guidance. References to Singapore privacy law and a data protection officer address data regulation rather than a lawyer's professional obligations when serving a client.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
ContractHero is bought by companies to manage their own contracts, with legal departments one user group among finance, procurement and management. Its named customers are companies rather than law firms, so no client bill sits in the loop. The financial examples concern internal contract administration and avoided commercial spending. They include up to 80 percent less review time per contract, about 20 percent of the Schüttflix legal team's working time, and euro savings at NUMA Group, hhpberlin and Stadtwerke Leonberg. ContractHero says nothing about fee treatment of AI assisted work for a firm that bills a client.
The principal buyer is a company's own legal department, with sales, procurement and HR using forms and approvals around that team's contracts. The Virtuos case measures internal NDA turnaround, and the product's savings claims concern corporate workloads and staffing capacity. Those examples do not involve a lawyer billing an external client for AI assisted work. Published subscription and run charges describe Pactly's software fees, without a client invoice method, pass through rule or accounting of billable legal time. Law firm fee treatment is not part of the described workflow.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
A downloadable DPA includes technical safeguards and a processor schedule with service roles and European Union locations. Suppliers include AWS, Google Gemini, Microsoft Azure, Modal Labs, Qdrant, Twilio, Crisp, Startdeliver, DeepL, Dropbox and eID Easy. An older help summary covers only some of those suppliers and is not the complete current schedule. Processor changes have notice and objection provisions, while the ISO certificate and AI policy provide further assessment material.
These materials describe platform processing; a client specific AI use disclosure or litigation filing template is not included.
A public provider register identifies data categories, functions and regions, including core Bedrock inference, fallback Anthropic and OpenAI services, and AI monitoring. Customers can subscribe to change notices and object before a new supplier is engaged. The trust page offers security reports and a certificate on request, while service terms and the law enforcement policy provide additional diligence material. No dedicated client consent pack or outside counsel AI disclosure form is supplied. Counsel would still need to distinguish the contractual improvement permissions from the marketing training promise.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Every AI filled value is marked and linked to its source passage, and the verification counter shows which fields a person has confirmed. ContractHero commits to labeling AI wherever it is used. The change log cannot be edited, but read and download events are not consistently logged, it has no one click export, and permanent deletion removes a contract's log with it. Nothing records which model produced a value. ContractHero's output is a contract register and reports rather than court filings, and it offers no disclosure template or guidance.
Projects can export values, reasoning and source references to Excel, and produce a PDF preserving the table's visual labels. Human corrections and verifications record who acted and when inside the application, but the help guide expressly says the Excel export omits that sign off marker. Word review retains tracked edits and written justifications for deviations, while account activity is available through logs. These records preserve parts of the process without a combined export of model version, exact prompts, source context and human approval for a court filing.
The questions both sides leave open
Derived from the records above rather than written, so it cannot favor either vendor. Take these into both conversations and ask each side the same question.
- Primary Law Corpus Provenance
- Good Law Verification
Which one fits
Choose ContractHero if
- A contract register should organize costs, renewals and company entities.
- External assistants must inherit each ContractHero user's permissions.
- Single contract answers should stay within that agreement's information.
Choose Pactly if
- Lawyers need detailed playbooks and tracked redlines in Word.
- The same analysis questions should run across a portfolio.
- Reviewers need to retain corrected values when an analysis repeats.
In summary
ContractHero
ContractHero extracts structured contract fields with Jump to Source links and answers questions from the current agreement. Its MCP connector lets external assistants retrieve permitted contract information while preserving the user's access rights.
Pactly
Pactly brings negotiation playbooks, human accepted edits and batch analysis into a corporate contract system. Projects supports repeatable questions, source excerpts and corrections across a set of agreements.
Questions buyers ask
Can either MCP connector send or modify a contract?
Both connectors are restricted to reading. ContractHero preserves each user's existing permissions; Pactly describes eight company scoped tools for retrieving contracts, parties, playbooks, clauses and profile information. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 16, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Can ContractHero's built in assistant answer across the whole repository?
Its current assistant works on the open contract, with broader portfolio conversation described as planned. The separate MCP connector can retrieve portfolio information for an external assistant. Pactly Projects already uses tables for repeated analysis across files. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 16, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How can a reviewer inspect the text behind an answer?
For checking an extracted contractual obligation, AI Legal Index distinguishes ContractHero's Jump to Source field links from Pactly's result cells containing reasoning, quoted text and page access. Both provide a route back to the agreement.
Are ContractHero's connector and company groups included in every plan?
The MCP connector is an add on. Separate company environments are included with Enterprise and available as an addition to Professional. Pactly's project membership has its own sharing rules, which can widen repository access. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of October 16, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Neither vendor paid for inclusion, placement or a grade, and neither reviewed this page before it published. Everything on it comes from public material on the dates shown. How the index grades.
ContractHero's built in assistant and its external MCP connection have different scopes; external assistant terms remain separate.