Definely vs Ivo: how they compare in 2026
Definely and Ivo both apply AI to contract review for transactional lawyers, and they are evenly matched. What separates them is which kind of evidence each publishes. Definely publishes credentials. It holds ISO/IEC 42001 for AI management, certified by Prescient Security, with an AI System Register carrying impact assessments and defined ownership per system. Its ISO/IEC 27001:2022 was recertified on 4 February 2026 with zero nonconformities, and its SOC 2 Type 2 on 28 October 2025. A 2026 penetration test is summarized publicly against the previous year's findings. Ivo publishes measurement. Its benchmarking study scored its redlines blind against a practicing Am Law 25 Special Counsel and against Claude for Word across nineteen real contracts. Three attorneys judged them on five named criteria. Every participant's redlines and playbooks were released for download, and Ivo named its own weakest area. Neither publishes a price.
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.
Deterministic contract tools sit beside generative analysis inside Microsoft Word. Read provides navigation through definitions and references, while Proof checks formatting and drafting errors. Vault retrieves precedent clauses from a connected repository. Enhance interprets contract language and proposes revisions, and Cascade follows the consequences of a change through related provisions. The company began with Word tools before adding modern generative AI, so navigation and proofreading retain a distinct function without models. The Claude connector extends those tools into another interface and describes its structural checks as reproducible. AI supplies content analysis and contextual drafting alongside the existing contract editor.
Ivo applies models to contract review, portfolio analysis and the contracting workflow. Ivo Intelligence connects to contracts where they already live and adds extraction, plain English questions, amendment timelines and flags on departures from standard positions. Ivo Review assigns a separate agent to each topic, with a supervising agent that reconciles overlapping findings into one recommendation per topic, and applies playbook backed redlines in Word or Google Docs. Review also benchmarks clauses against the customer's executed contracts, narrowed by contract type, governing law, party role and industry, and Playbook Builder derives positions from those agreements. Ivo Assistant compares documents, researches regulation and reports on changes in the law. Each of these steps is model work over the customer's own contracts.
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.
Enhance links its answers to specific clauses and definitions in the contract material under review. Definely describes clause level indexing, retrieval augmented generation and several agents working together, with analysis focused on the active agreement and related files. Read separately exposes internal references and definitions so the lawyer can inspect their source. The Claude connector describes its structural checks as deterministic and returns their results through Claude. These mechanisms connect findings with contract text, but no measured legal accuracy result, test set or hallucination rate establishes how reliably the generative layer interprets that text. A review speed claim does not measure answer correctness.
The contract review comparison set Ivo, Claude for Word running Opus 4.6 and a practicing Special Counsel at an Am Law 25 firm against the same 19 real, anonymized contracts. They spanned NDAs, MSAs, DPAs and other commercial types. Three attorneys with recent Am Law 100 or in house technology experience rated each output blind from 1 to 10 on issue spotting, surgical redlining, formatting retention, judgment and comments. The attorney averaged 4.56, Ivo 4.52 and Claude for Word 3.50, and the redlines and playbooks are downloadable. A contract took Ivo 2 minutes 45 seconds on average, against about 32 minutes for the attorney. The study names formatting retention as Ivo's weak area, and Ivo ran the study itself. Separately, Intelligence reports 97% accuracy against the Contract Understanding Atticus Dataset of 30,000 expert annotations, and Assistant returns cited answers from more than 100 legal sources.
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.
The lawyer works with findings inside Word and decides how to revise the agreement. Cascade exposes its reasoning about affected clauses, while Enhance offers contextual answers and suggested text that can be inserted into the contract. Definely describes AI as supporting defined tasks while leaving legal judgment with the reviewer. Its ISO 42001 framework also includes human oversight. These features provide an inspectable review surface and an expressed division of responsibility. Definely does not say what stops an agent, how far unattended decisions extend or how an erroneous recommendation is handled. A target for automating manual work does not itself define those operational limits.
Redlines appear in Word or Google Docs for a reviewer to accept or reject. Playbook Builder cites the agreements behind its proposed positions and allows review before saving. Collaborate selects a workflow when an agreement arrives, progresses low risk agreements to signature and routes matters requiring judgment to a reviewer. The customer supplies the workflow steps, playbook and policy in plain English. The terms require use under a lawyer's direct supervision. Precise criteria for classifying a contract as low risk and the response to an incorrect automatic approval are not specified.
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.
Definely identifies law firm and corporate users including Slaughter and May, Dentons, Shoosmiths, Shepherd and Wedderburn, Deloitte and Barclays. Its company material describes more than 150 enterprise customers and 40,000 active users in over 30 countries. The current home page includes a deployment account from Shepherd and Wedderburn's technology lead describing installation through Intune, alongside comments from legal and innovation leaders. The product also claims faster review, without connecting that figure to a dated customer study and a reproducible measurement method. Named adoption establishes use of the suite, while the contribution and error rate of each generative feature remain unmeasured.
Atlassian, Canva and CDW are featured with case studies, and Suhayb Ahmed, head of commercial legal at Canva, and Carla Michel, director and senior counsel at CDW, are quoted on the home page. Quora's legal operations lead, Adrie Christensen, says the first pass of redlines back to a counterparty fell from about 11 hours to 5 minutes. An assistant general counsel at Kandji says Ivo saved hundreds of hours in a year. None of these figures carries a date or a stated method. The benchmarking study compares output quality rather than production use: the attorney took 10 hours for the redlining tasks, while Ivo averaged 2 minutes and 45 seconds a contract.
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.
Both parties must protect confidential information with at least reasonable care and return or destroy it on termination or written request, under Definely's terms. The privacy policy identifies Azure as a processor of user content, while the trust center offers a data processing agreement and access control material through an access request. These provisions establish a confidentiality framework, but do not explicitly prohibit training models on client content. The privacy policy permits service improvement, and feedback receives a separate broad usage license. The terms do not address matter separation, attorney client privilege or work product handling. Detailed AI security information requires access approval.
Ivo's policy prohibits training AI models on customer data, while its general terms grant use of customer content to provide the service without a matching express training prohibition. Intelligence offers separate rooms for projects, acquisitions and business units, and customers assign roles and permissions. The terms provide deletion of customer content on request within 60 days after termination, with ordinary backup and record retention exceptions. Their No Legal Advice clause waives claims of malpractice, privilege and an attorney client relationship in relation to Ivo. Model provider retention and the detailed enforcement of room boundaries are not specified.
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.
Definely addresses lawyers at large law firms and corporate legal departments handling complex transactions. Its product position retains legal judgment with the professional while using AI for defined contract tasks. Read, Proof, Enhance and Cascade provide review tools inside Word rather than a consumer advice service. The terms nevertheless do not set out a distinct no legal advice boundary or connect product controls to competence and supervision duties under named professional rules. Nor do they set jurisdiction limits for use. The firm's markets across multiple countries and its focus on transactional work identify the audience, without establishing a professional responsibility framework for each location.
The terms carry a No Legal Advice clause. It says the service is no substitute for professional legal advice and that its legal information is general. Ivo does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of legal materials, and no attorney client or special relationship forms, including during implementation or training. The same clause has the customer warrant that use runs under the direct supervision of a lawyer representing it, which carries the supervision duty into the contract. No jurisdiction limit is stated, and no bar or ethics opinion is cited.
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.
Prescient Security is identified as the auditor behind the ISO/IEC 42001:2023 certification. The framework covers Enhance, Cascade and internal AI use, with a register recording each system, impact assessments, ownership and ongoing monitoring. Its stated scope includes fairness, transparency, human oversight and risk assessment across development and operation. Management reviews and internal audits support continuing governance. The description assigns ownership within the register but does not name the accountable person or role for model behavior. It also gives no measured results for differences across matter types or populations. Certification therefore establishes the management framework without exposing those evaluation outcomes.
Ivo's benchmark compares contract redlines through a blind review method. Three attorneys with recent Am Law 100 or in house experience judged redlines from Ivo, Claude for Word and a practicing Special Counsel across 19 real, anonymized contracts. Every output was stripped of identifying information and rated blind on five criteria, issue spotting, surgical redlining, formatting retention, comments and judgment. Ratings run from 1 to 10 as the mean of the three judges: 4.56 for the attorney, 4.52 for Ivo and 3.50 for Claude for Word. The study page sets out the playbook positions the redlines were judged against and offers the full report for download. No responsible AI policy, framework or accountable owner sits beside it, and SOC 2 and ISO 27001 cover information security.
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.
Access monitoring, backups, erasure, audit logging, incident reporting and vulnerability management are all covered in Definely's trust center. The terms require confidential information to be returned or destroyed on termination or written request. Its privacy appendix identifies Azure for user content and separate providers for analytics, licensing, payments and customer management, with advance notice before user content processors change. The general privacy retention rule follows service necessity and legal obligations, while organizational contact details can remain after a subscription ends. A specific prompt and output schedule and the retention practices of any underlying model provider remain unclear. The AI security whitepaper requires access approval.
The privacy policy keeps a contract or document tied to a thumbs down rating for 14 days before deleting or deidentifying it. Other personal information is kept as long as Ivo has a business or operational purpose, and on request after termination customer content is deleted within 60 days. Access control appears as the customer assigning roles and permissions to its authorized users. The subprocessor list and security documents sit in a Vanta trust center. No incident or breach notification practice 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.
Each party's aggregate liability is capped at fees paid or payable during the preceding 12 months under Definely's terms. They exclude consequential, indirect and several other categories of loss. The warranty disclaimer expressly covers the accuracy, completeness and reliability of content generated with the software, alongside the software and support themselves. These are contractual limits on recourse rather than a performance warranty for an AI recommendation. No customer indemnity for third party claims arising from generated output or insurance commitment is identified. Confidentiality breaches can support equitable remedies under a separate clause, while the general liability framework remains subject to the agreement's stated cap and exclusions.
The terms of 20 November 2024 cap Ivo's total liability at $100, and more than one claim does not raise the limit. Indirect, consequential and punitive damages are excluded, and clause 8 disclaims all warranties, accuracy and fitness included. The customer indemnifies Ivo, and no indemnity runs the other way. The customer also releases Ivo from every past, present and future claim relating to the service and waives section 1542 of the California Civil Code for unknown claims. Clause 14 adds a waiver of malpractice and privilege claims. Ivo's trust center lists a certificate of insurance among the documents it releases on request, and enterprise customers sign a separate Services Agreement that is not publicly available.
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.
The suite operates within Word, with Read opening definitions and references, Enhance inserting suggested language and Vault bringing precedent clauses into the active agreement. Vault connects to document management repositories, including iManage and NetDocuments; the current product page also shows SharePoint. It can insert associated definitions and update references when adding a clause. A separate MCP connector exposes Definely tools in Claude, with sign in through a Definely account and enterprise enablement by IT. Installation and architecture material is available through the trust center. The openly accessible product material does not describe permission inheritance or the administrative configuration of each repository connection.
Review and Assistant run as add ins inside Microsoft Word and Google Docs, and review works on Word, PDF and Google Docs files. Intelligence connects to contracts wherever they are stored. Collaborate takes intake in Salesforce, redlines in Word and approvals in Slack, and syncs each teammate's changes back to the same deal with version history. Connections also reach existing file systems, cloud storage, common CRMs and e signature vendors. Slack, Google Docs and Teams are among the services a customer may connect, through which Ivo may receive messages and attachments. Named document management systems, a developer reference and what syncs in each direction are not described.
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.
A Word add in works alongside hosted services. Local architecture diagrams for Read, Proof and Vault are available through the trust center, which also identifies AWS infrastructure. The privacy policy names Azure as a processor hosting user content and lists possible personal data processing countries including Belarus, Lithuania, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. Those general locations are not selectable contract data residency commitments. The product material does not identify which model runs in which region, distinguish storage from inference for every feature, or specify a tenant architecture. The precise AI processing boundary is therefore left unresolved.
Delivery is in the cloud, with no region, residency option, tenancy model or hosting provider stated. The privacy policy says the business operates from the United States, Canada and other jurisdictions. Personal information may be transferred to and stored in the United States and other places whose laws differ, and transfers out of Europe rely on standard contractual clauses.
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.
The certification disclosure is named, dated and attributed. ISO/IEC 27001:2022 was recertified in February 2026 by the British Assessment Bureau, now Amtivo, a UKAS accredited body, with the audit dated 4 February 2026 and zero major and zero minor nonconformities. SOC 2 Type 2 was recertified on 28 October 2025 under AICPA SSAE 18 standards, with Prescient Security named as auditor. ISO/IEC 42001:2023 is certified by Prescient Security, alongside Cyber Essentials and a GDPR program. A 2026 independent penetration test is summarized: it covered web applications, APIs, client side integrations and external network infrastructure, was benchmarked against the OWASP Top Ten, and found low overall risk with no critical, high or medium severity findings. The summary compares this with the prior year's results, which did include medium severity findings. A SafeBase trust center holds the SOC 2 report, penetration test report, architecture diagrams, privacy and security whitepaper and policy set behind a self serve access request rather than a sales gate.
SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certification are stated, with GDPR and CCPA compliance. A Vanta trust center handles requests for the certifications and supplies subprocessor and audit material. No auditor, coverage period or scope appears on the open site. Access to the underlying reports depends on approval through that portal.
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.
Several agents, retrieval augmented generation and clause level indexing make up the AI architecture Definely describes. AWS appears in the trust center, and the privacy appendix identifies Azure as a host for user content. Those infrastructure names do not identify the foundation models used by Enhance or Cascade. The Claude connector is a separate integration through which Claude calls Definely's tools, rather than proof that Anthropic supplies every model inside the suite. No production model version is specified. Customer notice applies to changes in user content processors, but an equivalent promise covering every model change is not identified.
The engine is described as proprietary, and no model or provider is named for live use. The privacy policy lists artificial intelligence among the services that vendors help with, and the benchmark tested Claude for Word as a comparison rather than as a component. Where inference runs is not stated, and the subprocessor list sits in the trust center rather than on the site.
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.
Individual orders and a demo led sales process are how Definely sells its software. Its terms require annual payment in advance, define an initial 12 month term and provide for successive annual renewals. Orders can include software licenses, additional users and upgraded packages, with currency and fees set in the customer's account. The agreement permits limited trials or beta access at Definely's discretion without establishing a universally available free plan. The suite has no published numeric rate or fixed charging unit, and Definely gives no implementation costs. The contractual payment structure is identifiable, while a buyer cannot calculate a subscription total from a standard rate card.
Every route in is a demo request, and no price is listed. The terms set the shape. Fees are fixed in a Services Agreement for an initial term with renewal terms, priced and invoiced in United States dollars, and nonrefundable apart from prorated refunds on certain terminations. Ivo can change fees or add charges at the end of a term with 30 days notice, and the privacy policy describes the business as subscriptions. Implementation takes about a week.
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.
Definely targets large law firms, including Magic Circle and Am Law firms, and corporate legal departments at major enterprises. Its named settings include acquisitions, banking, insurance and complex commercial agreements. The suite focuses on an active contract and its related files, with tasks such as clause reuse, linked definition review, issues list extraction and analysis of changes across an agreement set. It is positioned for complex transactional work rather than high volume processing of routine contracts or lifecycle administration. That boundary distinguishes the product from a general legal assistant or a CLM platform, while its main working environment remains the lawyer's contract in Word.
The buyer is the in house legal department at large enterprises, and the named customers run across technology, semiconductors, payments, food service, industrials and retail distribution. Coverage is described by document type: the benchmark covers NDAs, MSAs, DPAs and other commercial agreements, and Review handles any document in Word, PDF or Google Docs. Research covers United States sources such as EDGAR, the United States Code, Congress.gov, eCFR and the Federal Register, and UK and EU material from Companies House, Parliament and the Court of Justice. No company size floor, excluded contract type or unsupported jurisdiction is stated, and law firms are not addressed.
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 software terms and general privacy policy do not state whether customer content may train models. Definely permits use of feedback without a confidentiality restriction, and its privacy policy allows service improvement and development of new products, without naming model training. An AI security whitepaper is available through a trust center access request, but its contents were not available for review and cannot establish a separate commitment.
Customer data never trains AI models, according to the home page. The terms carry no matching clause; they let Ivo use customer content to provide the service and use feedback freely. The privacy policy lets Ivo improve its services by analyzing feature use and submitted documentation, and use deidentified or aggregated information for any purpose. Intelligence uses customer agreements to build playbooks and answer repository questions.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
Clause 9.4 of Definely's terms requires return or destruction of confidential information when the agreement ends or the other party makes a written request. The privacy policy separately retains personal information for service needs and legal obligations, including some organizational contacts after subscription termination. The contract supplies a customer instruction route, but no product setting defines a prompt and output window or an immediate zero retention configuration.
Information is kept as long as Ivo has a business or operational purpose, with no period and no customer setting. A contract or document tied to a thumbs down rating is kept for 14 days, then deleted or deidentified unless the law requires otherwise. On request after termination, customer content is deleted within 60 days, subject to ordinary backup and record retention exceptions in the terms.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
Vault retrieves clauses and definitions from connected document management systems, including iManage and NetDocuments, and can insert them into a contract. Definely's trust center includes access control policies and monitoring material behind an access request. The accessible product information does not explain whether retrieval applies each user's source permissions at request time or how matter walls are enforced, so the existence of a repository connector does not resolve that boundary.
Intelligence offers separate rooms for projects, acquisitions and business units to control access and the scope of analysis. Customers also assign user roles and permissions. The rooms provide a way to separate contract collections inside the service, but the permission inheritance, administrator setup and enforcement at retrieval time are not described. No automatic inheritance of a source document system's ethical walls is specified.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
Clause 9.1 of Definely's software terms permits disclosure of confidential information only to the extent required by a subpoena, court order or governmental authority, after prompt notice to the other party of the intended disclosure. That contractual notice is distinct from the privacy policy's general permission to disclose personal data for legal reasons. No transparency report or volume of government requests accompanies the commitment.
The Legal Process clause of the terms lets Ivo respond to subpoenas, warrants, liens and other legal orders about an account, without responsibility for the customer's resulting losses. Where permitted, Ivo gives reasonable notice that it received the order. No transparency report is offered.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
Vault draws precedent clauses and definitions from the customer's connected repository and clause library. Enhance uses the contract and related material to provide contextual responses, while Read links internal definitions and references. The source collection is therefore the customer's own; Definely describes no vendor supplied primary law database, no separate rights basis for foundation model training material and no update cadence for legal authorities.
Assistant answers from more than 100 legal sources. For the United States these include EDGAR and SEC filings, the United States Code, Congress.gov, eCFR and the Federal Register, and UK and EU questions draw on Companies House, Parliament and the Court of Justice. No license basis or update schedule is given. Most of the product's material is the customer's own executed contracts and playbooks, with Playbook Builder citing each position back to its source agreement.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
Definely checks internal references and defined terms in transactional agreements. It can map broken or circular references and expose the relevant contract text, but these functions do not determine the subsequent history of a court decision. No licensed citator or independent treatment signal is identified for external legal authority. The suite's principal context is drafting and reviewing an agreement, with the source material coming from the contract and connected precedents.
Assistant and Review retrieve case law and statutes with citations, described as verified, and Assistant reports on changes in the law. Whether a cited authority has later history or has been superseded is not flagged.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
The Claude connector describes its structural tools as deterministic, with the same analysis producing identical results for the same input. That claim concerns reproducibility of the tools rather than a refusal rule for every generative response. Enhance and Cascade provide contract analysis and reasoning for review, but no defined abstention message or confidence indicator explains what occurs when the supplied material cannot support an answer.
Review gives one recommendation per topic with the reasoning and source behind it, and a user can rate an answer down after the fact. No behavior is described for a question the product cannot answer from its sources, and no confidence measure is shown.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
No identified court order, opinion or disciplinary decision attributes fabricated citations to Definely or Defeyene Legal Solutions Limited. Damien Charlotin's AI Hallucination Cases database contains no match for either name in the tool field or wider case text as of October 15, 2026. Finding no reported case says nothing about legal accuracy, and the product's principal use is transactional contract review rather than preparation of authorities for court filings.
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 Ivo or Ivo AI, Inc. Its products review and manage contracts for in house legal teams.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
Definely provides material about contract review risks and operates an AI management framework that includes human oversight. Those controls address product governance and the reviewer's role, but do not map the suite to a named bar opinion or professional regulator's guidance. ABA Formal Opinion 512, state bar requirements and Solicitors Regulation Authority or Law Society guidance are not identified as the governing framework for the product's use.
The terms require use under the direct supervision of a lawyer representing the customer. Their No Legal Advice clause says the service provides general legal information, forms no attorney client relationship and cannot replace professional advice. Ivo does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of legal material. A named bar opinion or jurisdiction specific ethics guidance does not accompany that contractual supervision requirement.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Faster contract review and less manual drafting work are what Definely associates with its tools. Law firms are a principal customer group, so reduced work can affect matters performed for clients rather than only an internal department's costs. The suite's contract reports and issues lists do not form a matter billing record, and no guidance specifies how a firm should adjust fees or disclose AI assisted work to a client.
Ivo is sold to in house legal teams at large enterprises, with Atlassian, Canva and CDW as its featured customers. Its time claims are aimed at those teams. The home page promises review, redlines and insights from contracts in minutes. In Ivo's benchmarking study the attorney took 10 hours for the redlining tasks, while Ivo averaged 2 minutes and 45 seconds a contract.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
Definely's privacy appendix names Azure for user content, with advance notice before those processors change. It separately identifies analytics, payments, licensing and customer management providers. The trust center offers a data processing agreement, security reports, architecture material and AI security documentation through an access request. This gives a firm named processing information and a route to diligence material, without a dedicated client consent or notification pack.
The subprocessor list and security documents sit in a Vanta trust center where copies of the SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications are requested. The privacy policy confirms that AI providers are among Ivo's service providers without naming them, and no client facing disclosure material is offered. Requests pass through the portal's access process before the reports are supplied.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
The Claude connector can return contract review results in HTML, DOCX and table formats, including issues and reference reports. Audit logging also appears in Definely's trust center. These artifacts support retention of findings, but no combined record identifies the model, retrieved sources and human verification for a particular court filing. The workflow remains centered on transactional agreements rather than certification under a judicial AI disclosure order.
Playbook Builder cites each drafted position back to the agreement it came from, Review gives the source behind each recommendation, and redlines land as tracked changes a person accepts. The model behind a passage is not recorded, and no export for a court filing is offered.
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.
- Good Law Verification
- Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
- Bar Guidance Alignment
Which one fits
Choose Definely if
- Your security review wants the certificate, the auditor and the date. Definely publishes ISO/IEC 27001:2022 recertified on 4 February 2026 by the British Assessment Bureau, now Amtivo, with zero major and zero minor nonconformities. Its SOC 2 Type 2 was recertified on 28 October 2025 with Prescient Security named as auditor, and a 2026 penetration test is summarized publicly and compared against the previous year's findings.
- You want the AI itself inside an audited management system. Definely holds ISO/IEC 42001:2023 for AI management, certified by Prescient Security, and publishes what the certification covers: the full AI lifecycle, a formal AI System Register with impact assessments and defined ownership for each in scope system, and continuous monitoring rather than a point in time check.
- You want a vendor that says what it is not for. Definely publishes its own boundary, stating that it should not be described as a general purpose legal AI platform or a contract lifecycle system, that it is optimized for complex high risk contracts rather than high volume low complexity documents, and that its focus is the active contract and related documents rather than portfolio wide analysis.
Choose Ivo if
- You want output measured rather than asserted. Ivo publishes a benchmarking study scoring its redlines blind against a practicing Am Law 25 Special Counsel and Claude for Word across nineteen real contracts, judged by three attorneys on five named criteria. Every participant's redlines and every playbook are published for download, and its own weakest area, formatting retention, is named and shown.
- You want the supervision expectation written into the contract. Clause 14 of Ivo's Terms states that the service does not provide legal advice and creates no attorney client relationship, and requires the customer to represent and warrant that its use will be under the direct supervision of a qualified lawyer representing the customer.
- You are not replacing your contract repository. Ivo Intelligence connects to contracts wherever they are already stored, extracts data for plain language querying, shows an agreement and its amendments as a single timeline and flags deviations from standard positions, and named individuals at Canva and CDW speak on the record about it alongside a roster including Meta, Uber, IBM and Atlassian.
In summary
Definely
Definely is a Microsoft Word native suite for drafting, navigating and reviewing complex high value contracts, sold to large law firms and corporate legal departments. It spans Read for definitions and cross references, Proof for automated proofreading, Vault for clause level precedent search against a connected document management system, Enhance for AI analysis and Cascade for knock on effects across related contracts. According to the AI Legal Index, Definely's case rests on audited management of its AI and its security. It holds ISO/IEC 42001 for AI management with a formal AI System Register and defined ownership per system, alongside ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and SOC 2 Type 2 with named auditors and dates. No accuracy figure, model provider or pricing at any level is published, and no training statement appears on its open pages.
Ivo
Ivo is an AI contract review platform for in house legal teams at large enterprises. It checks agreements against a company's own playbooks and executed contracts and applies redlines in Microsoft Word or Google Docs. A Playbook Builder cites each position back to the agreement it came from, and an intelligence layer connects to contracts wherever they are stored. According to the AI Legal Index, Ivo publishes a benchmarking study that scored its output blind against a practicing Am Law 25 Special Counsel and released the underlying redlines and playbooks. No model provider, governance material or price is published.
Questions buyers ask
Definely vs Ivo: which is better for contract review?
They are evenly matched, and they separate on the kind of evidence each publishes. Definely publishes credentials, including three certifications with named auditors and dates and a penetration test summarized in public. Ivo publishes measurement, including a blind scored comparison of its redlines against a practicing attorney with the underlying files released. A buyer who has to satisfy procurement and one who has to satisfy a skeptical partner will not reach the same answer. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 3, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Has either published an accuracy measurement?
Ivo has. Its benchmarking study scored output from Ivo, from Claude for Word and from a practicing Am Law 25 Special Counsel across nineteen real contracts, blind judged by three attorneys on five criteria. It reports means of 4.52 for Ivo and 4.56 for the attorney, with review times of 2 minutes 45 seconds against roughly 32 minutes. Ivo ran the study itself. Definely publishes no accuracy figure, only a claim of 40 to 70 percent faster contract review. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 3, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Do either say whether they train on customer contracts?
Ivo states on its home page that it never trains AI models on customer data. Its privacy policy separately states that Ivo may develop or improve services by analyzing how features are used and the documentation submitted, and reserves the right to use de identified or aggregated information for any purpose. Neither passage names models or training. Definely makes no statement either way on its open pages, so the AI Legal Index records it as silent rather than as a commitment.
Which one publishes its security certifications with dates and auditors?
Definely. It names three certifications with their auditors and dates, and publishes a penetration test summary that includes a comparison against the prior year's medium severity findings. Its trust center carries the SOC 2 report, the penetration test report, architecture diagrams and its policy set behind a self serve access request. Ivo claims SOC 2 and ISO 27001 on its home page. Its trust center renders client side with no readable content, so no auditor, scope or coverage period can be read from it. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 3, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
What do Definely and Ivo both leave unpublished?
Neither publishes a price, a tier structure or a unit of charge. Neither names a model or a provider behind its AI, so neither could tell a client whose system reads its contracts. Neither describes segregation between users or matters, which matters for products indexing a firm's or a company's whole document set. Neither names a bar or ethics authority, including ABA Formal Opinion 512. And neither states a hosting region or a tenancy model. From the AI Legal Index, based on each vendor's own published materials as of September 3, 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.
Two things to read carefully. Ivo's accuracy study was run by Ivo, so the independence sits in the blind judging panel of three attorneys rather than in the sponsorship. The methodology states three judges while one FAQ answer says five. The absolute scores are low on the study's own scale, with the human attorney baseline at 4.56 out of 10, so the finding is comparability rather than excellence. On Definely, the training question has no public answer. No statement about whether customer content trains models appears on any open page, and the AI security whitepaper that would answer it sits behind a trust center access request. Neither vendor reviewed this page.