C
ContractWorks
ContractWorks is a contract repository for teams that need simple contract management, sold by Onit. Users drag and drop contracts into folders, and AI tags each one with details such as agreement type, parties, effective date, renewal terms and notice windows. AI search, OCR, a smart outline of section headings, highlights, custom tags and scheduled reports help teams find terms and track dates, and alerts warn of renewals and deadlines.
Electronic signature is built in. ContractWorks Premium adds drafting from templates with conditional logic, a clause library, redlining in a Word compatible editor, approval workflows and an AI clause creator, and runs on Onit's AXDRAFT platform. Every plan includes unlimited users. Published plans set document limits and signature licenses, from 2,500 documents and five licenses on Standard, but the plan prices are not shown; extra signature licenses cost $1,200 a year for five.
ContractWorks runs on Amazon Web Services, hosted in the United States or Ireland, holds a SOC 2 Type 2 report, and says it has no backend access to customer data. Onit's services agreement, data processing addendum and subprocessor list govern it. Case studies name Walmart Canada, BNP Paribas, Slack, Sandoz and Carlsberg, and Onit offers a 14 day free trial.
ContractWorks, head to head
Side by side on the same 15 capability axes and 12 legal signals: where the two part company, and what neither one publishes.
Capability grades
All 15 axes, graded from public sources on the date shown. 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.
ContractWorks is a secure contract repository with search, tagging, alerts, reports and eSignature, and on Premium, drafting, redlining and approval workflows. AI is a layer on that base. Smart Document Tagging adds tags such as effective date, renewal date and termination date on upload, Smart Contract Generation identifies agreement type, parties, effective dates, renewal terms and notice windows, search is described as AI powered, and Premium's feature list includes a GPT-3 AI Clause Creator.
The repository, folders, custom tags, OCR search, highlights, date alerts, reporting and signatures all work without the models, and ContractWorks also sells a contract tagging service performed by its legal engineers and licensed attorneys. The product pages describe it as a secure, AI powered repository for teams that need simple, effective contract management.
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.
ContractWorks publishes no accuracy figure, error rate or evaluation for its AI tagging, extraction, search or clause creation. Snippet View lets a reviewer see tagged information in context across several agreements at once, which lets a person check a tag against the contract text, and drafting is marketed as producing compliant, error free contracts without any measure behind it. Section 12.3 of Onit's Subscription and Services Agreement, last revised 19 August 2026, says AI output is machine generated and may be incomplete, inaccurate, biased or unsuited to the customer's purpose, and makes the customer solely responsible for review and reliance.
The GPT-3 clause creator names a model generation that OpenAI has since replaced, and nothing says whether the feature now runs on a newer model.
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.
Section 12.3 of Onit's services agreement makes the customer solely responsible for review of and reliance on AI output, including obtaining legal or other professional advice as appropriate, and says Onit is not liable for decisions taken on it. In the product, AI tags are added automatically on upload and can be reviewed in Snippet View, and Premium approval workflows route contracts under automated conditional flows.
Administrators alone invite users and set each person's permissions, and an audit trail records every click. Nothing published says whether AI tags are applied without review, whether a person confirms an AI drafted clause before it enters a contract, or what happens when a tag or alert date is wrong. Section 12.8 says no service levels apply to AI features unless an order says so.
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.
ContractWorks lists named case studies for Esquire Deposition Solutions, BNP Paribas, Walmart Canada, DNA Payments, Slack, Sandoz, Carlsberg, OLX Group, Louis Dreyfus Company and GreenShield Canada. Named testimonials quote Louis Belzil, General Counsel of Tier 1 Energy Solutions, Lynn Towler, Senior Contracts Manager at Shift4 Payments, Nicole Dunn, Contracts Administrator at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and Adrienne Foster, Contract Manager at Xeris Pharmaceuticals, who reports loading more than 1,200 contracts in the year to date.
The workflow page claims 80 percent faster contract workflows, at least 100 hours saved, at least $9,000 in value and a two week rollout, with no customer or method behind the figures. The case study titles give no deployment dates, and the outcomes quoted concern ease of use, price and repository setup rather than the AI 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.
Onit's Subscription and Services Agreement, last revised 19 August 2026, leaves the customer owning its data (5.1) and treats it as confidential, with reasonable advance notice before a compelled disclosure where law permits (8.5). Section 5.2 lets Onit use customer data, once aggregated and anonymized, for product improvement, analysis and benchmarking, section 12.1 lets it use deidentified usage data to improve its AI, and the same section bars third party model providers from training on input for others' benefit except in deidentified or aggregated form needed to run the service.
Nothing states whether Onit trains its own models on customer contracts. The ContractWorks security page says ContractWorks never has backend access to customer data, and adds watermarks and view only access. Privilege and work product are not addressed.
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.
Section 4.14 of Onit's services agreement, headed No Legal Advice, states that Onit is not a law firm and does not offer legal advice, recommendations, opinions, representation, referrals or counseling, and takes no responsibility for the quality or compliance of documents the customer generates. Section 12.3 tells customers to obtain legal or other professional advice as appropriate when relying on AI output, and section 12.7 bars using the AI features for decisions with a material legal or similarly significant effect on an individual.
ContractWorks is sold to HR, sales, finance and nonprofit teams as well as legal, and its contract tagging service is run by legal engineers and licensed attorneys. Nothing addresses how the product supports a lawyer's competence and supervision duties or any limit by jurisdiction.
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.
Neither ContractWorks nor Onit publishes an AI governance position: there is no responsible AI page, named owner for model behavior, release testing process or result, and no AI management certification. The AI terms in Onit's services agreement allocate risk rather than describe governance. Section 12.3 warns that output may be biased, section 12.4 lets Onit improve, replace or deprecate models or prompts without materially reducing core functionality, and section 12.7 restricts the customer's own uses.
The SOC 2 Type 2 report covers security, availability and confidentiality of systems rather than model behavior, and nothing addresses whether tagging performs differently across contract types or languages.
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.
The ContractWorks security page describes TLS 1.2 with 256 bit encryption in transit, 256 bit AES at rest, salted and Bcrypt hashed passwords, hourly encrypted backups across data centers in the United States and the European Union, SAML single sign on, multifactor authentication by SMS or authenticator app, administrator controlled permissions, watermarks, view only access, and an audit trail of every click that can be exported or emailed daily.
A security specification PDF is downloadable. Onit's subprocessor list, updated 17 August 2026, names the suppliers for the SecureDocs platform that runs ContractWorks, and customers can subscribe to change notices with 15 days to object under section 4.5 of the agreement. The pricing FAQ says records are deleted within 30 days after a customer leaves, and section 6.5 points to a retention policy that is not published. No breach notice period 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.
Onit's Subscription and Services Agreement, last revised 19 August 2026, warrants that the subscription services operate substantially as documented and that material functionality will not decrease during the term (9.2). Onit defends and indemnifies the customer against claims that the services infringe intellectual property rights (11.1). Each party's liability is capped at fees paid or payable in the 12 months before the event (10.2), with listed claims, including indemnities, outside the cap (10.3).
For AI, section 12.5 provides the AI features and output as is, with all warranties disclaimed, section 12.3 says Onit is not liable for decisions taken on output, and section 12.8 excludes AI features from service levels unless an order says otherwise. No insurance is published.
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.
ContractWorks lists integrations as features in its plan table: a Salesforce integration, Fujitsu ScanSnap scanning, uploading contracts by email, SAML 2.0 single sign on, and on Premium, integration with public registers and databases. The security page names Microsoft Active Directory, OneLogin and Okta as identity providers for single sign on. Premium drafting works in a Word compatible editor, and the AXDRAFT platform that runs Premium lists DocuSign as its signing API.
No integration page describes what the Salesforce connection syncs, in which direction or what an administrator configures, no API is documented, and no document management system used by law firms is listed. Onit's subprocessor list names Workato as an integration platform across Onit products.
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.
Onit's subprocessor list, updated 17 August 2026, says ContractWorks runs on the SecureDocs platform on Amazon Web Services, with the customer choosing hosting in the United States or Ireland and backups in Germany. ContractWorks Premium runs on the AXDRAFT platform, where AWS hosting can be in the European Union, Canada or the United States and Google Cloud in the EU is the primary infrastructure. OpenAI is listed for all Onit platforms, with its locations given as the United States and worldwide.
The security page says data is stored in multiple data centers in the United States and the European Union. No tenancy model, private deployment or on premises option is described.
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.
ContractWorks states a SOC 2 Type 2 report from an independent auditor covering security, availability and confidentiality, and makes a security specification PDF available for download. The ISO 27001 certification and SOC 1, 2 and 3 reports named on the security page belong to the AWS data centers it uses, not to ContractWorks itself. No auditor, report period or route to request the SOC 2 report before signing is published, and no trust center is linked. Onit's data processing addendum lets customers rely on recent SSAE 18 reports in place of an on site audit.
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.
Onit's subprocessor list names OpenAI, in the United States and worldwide, as the AI provider used across all Onit platforms, and ContractWorks Premium's feature list names a GPT-3 AI Clause Creator. Onit's contract products listed separately use Anthropic and Google Gemini, but neither is listed for ContractWorks. Customers can subscribe to email notice of subprocessor changes and object within 15 days under section 4.5 of the services agreement, while section 12.4 lets Onit replace models or prompts without notice if core functionality is not materially reduced. Nothing says which ContractWorks features use OpenAI or which model version runs the tagging and search.
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.
ContractWorks publishes three plans with their limits but leaves the price fields blank. Standard includes unlimited users, 2,500 documents and five electronic signature licenses; Professional includes 10,000 documents and ten licenses; Premium adds drafting, redlining and workflows with unlimited documents. All are billed annually. Additional signature licenses cost $1,200 a year for a pack of five, a nonprofit discount is offered, and a 14 day trial converts to the Standard license.
The pricing FAQ says template automation and onboarding are part of a paid implementation, while the workflow page says ContractWorks handles the rollout at no extra cost. The FAQ also uses older plan names, Essential, Standard and Enterprise, for the signature allowances. Orders are signed electronically and paid by card, ACH or wire.
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.
ContractWorks has solution pages for HR, sales, healthcare, SaaS, construction and engineering, government, nonprofit and hospitality teams, and describes itself as built for teams that need simple, effective contract management, with unlimited users on every plan. Its case studies span retail, banking, payments, software, pharmaceuticals, consumer goods, commodities and legal services, and testimonials come from a general counsel, contracts managers and a contracts administrator.
Premium is positioned for companies scaling to a full CLM. Clients outside the United States subscribe and pay in US dollars. Nothing published names contract types or languages the AI tagging does not handle, sets a size limit or addresses law firm use.
5 public documents
The public pages on file for ContractWorks, with the recorded signals each one supports and the date it was last read. Open any of them and check the reading against the record.
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onit.com/services-agreement4 signals
Client Data in Training, Prompt and Output Retention, Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice and 1 more
Read Oct 8, 2026
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Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation, Court Disclosure Support
Read Oct 8, 2026
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contractworks.com1 signal
Billing and Fee Posture
Read Oct 8, 2026
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Fabricated Citation Record
Read Oct 8, 2026
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onit.com/sub-processors1 signal
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Read Oct 8, 2026
No published figure
- ContractWorks lists three plans and what each includes, but the price boxes on its pricing page are empty.
- Every plan lets your whole organization use it. Standard holds up to 2,500 documents with five signature licenses, Professional holds 10,000 with ten, and Premium adds drafting and approvals with no document limit.
- Plans are paid yearly. If you need more people who can send documents for signature, five more licenses cost $1,200 a year.
- You can try it free for 14 days, and nonprofits can ask for a discount.
Plan structure published, plan prices withheld. Standard: unlimited users, 2,500 documents, five electronic signature licenses. Professional: unlimited users, 10,000 documents, ten licenses. Premium: drafting, redlining and workflows with unlimited documents. All billed annually, with each plan's price field labeled Starting at and left empty. Additional electronic signature licenses cost $1,200 a year for a pack of five; recipients sign free without a license or login.
Orders are sent as an electronic order form and paid by credit card, ACH or wire, with wires accepted in US dollars on annual terms for customers outside the United States. A nonprofit discount is available on request. The 14 day trial converts to the Standard license on subscription, carrying over contracts, tags, alerts and users.
Implementation: The pricing FAQ says template automation and onboarding are included as part of a paid implementation process, while the approval workflows page says ContractWorks handles the entire rollout at no extra cost in two weeks. No implementation fee is published.
Confidentiality and data terms: Onit's data processing addendum and services agreement are published and govern ContractWorks. The healthcare solution page targets healthcare contract management, and no business associate agreement for ContractWorks is published.
Note: No plan price appears on the page, so no entry price is shown. The only published figure is $1,200 a year per five extra signature licenses. The FAQ refers to Essential, Standard and Enterprise plans with five, ten and twenty signature licenses, while the plan table names Standard, Professional and Premium. Onit's Subscription and Services Agreement, last revised 19 August 2026, governs fees, renewals and AI usage limits.
Legal Signals
What each signal meansA signal records what public sources say on the date shown. It is not a grade and it is not a recommendation. Where a signal reads Not addressed, it means the index did not locate the material in public sources on that date, which is a statement about disclosure rather than about the product.
Client Data in Training
Can material a lawyer puts into this product be used to train a model?
The published agreement expressly reserves a right to train on customer content, with no opt out located. Any de identification, anonymization or aggregation qualifier is recorded in the summary.
Onit's Subscription and Services Agreement, last revised 19 August 2026, which governs ContractWorks, bars third party model providers from using input to train their models for the benefit of others, except in deidentified or aggregated form necessary to operate the service (12.1). The same section lets Onit use deidentified, aggregated usage data to operate and improve its AI services, and section 5.2 lets it use customer data, once aggregated and anonymized, for product improvement, analysis and benchmarking.
No opt out is described, and nothing states whether Onit trains its own models on customer contracts. The ContractWorks pages say nothing about training.
Prompt and Output Retention
How long does the product keep what a lawyer typed, and can that be set to zero?
Retention is acknowledged in public materials with no stated period.
Section 6.5 of Onit's services agreement gives the customer 30 days after termination to export its data and then deletes it under Onit's current retention policy, which is not published. The ContractWorks pricing FAQ says all records are deleted within 30 days once a departing customer confirms it is off the system, and customers can bulk download their documents at any time. The security page describes hourly encrypted backups across data centers in the United States and the European Union.
Section 12.2 says Onit has no duty to retain or recreate AI output unless the service expressly provides retention and it is enabled. No period is stated for AI tags, clause suggestions or search queries during the term, or for what OpenAI keeps.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
The product maintains its own permission model, documented, requiring the firm to keep it aligned.
ContractWorks keeps its own permission model. Only administrators can invite users to the repository, and they choose permission settings for each person, with access controlled by folder and document, permission based user roles in every plan, view only access that disables printing, and personally identifiable watermarks. Sign in can run through SAML single sign on with Microsoft Active Directory, OneLogin or Okta, with multifactor authentication by SMS or authenticator app.
An audit trail records every click with user, date, time and action and can be emailed to administrators daily. The security page says ContractWorks never has backend access to customer data. Nothing published says how AI search and tagging apply folder permissions when they run, or how customers are separated from one another on the platform.
Third Party Request and Subpoena Notice
If someone subpoenas the vendor for a firm’s data, does the firm hear about it first?
Terms commit to notice where lawfully permitted. No transparency report located.
Section 8.5 of Onit's Subscription and Services Agreement, last revised 19 August 2026, which covers ContractWorks customer data as confidential information, commits to reasonable advance notice of a disclosure required by law, where law permits, and reasonable cooperation, at the customer's expense, in seeking confidential treatment, and says the disclosed information stays confidential between the parties afterward.
Onit's data processing addendum commits to notify the customer promptly of government requests about its processing unless prohibited. The ContractWorks security page adds that ContractWorks never has backend access to customer data. No transparency report is published.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
No located public material identifies the corpus behind the product’s answers.
ContractWorks' AI reads the contracts a customer uploads to tag dates, parties and terms, builds an outline from section headings after OCR, and supports search across the repository. It does not retrieve case law or legislation. Nothing published identifies what the tagging models were trained on or what sources the GPT-3 clause creator draws on, and Onit's subprocessor list names OpenAI as the AI provider without describing its training data.
For customers who want tags applied by people, ContractWorks sells a contract tagging service run by its legal engineers and licensed attorneys.
Good Law Verification
Does the product tell you when the authority it just cited has been overruled?
No located public material addresses whether authority is checked for subsequent history.
ContractWorks stores and tags a customer's own contracts and does not cite case law or legislation, so a citator is not part of the product. Nothing on the ContractWorks pages or in Onit's agreement addresses checking authority for later history, and the Premium clause library is maintained by the customer with nothing describing how outdated language is flagged.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behavior
What does the product do when the answer is not in the corpus?
No located public material addresses what the product does when it cannot ground an answer.
No path for declining to answer is documented, and no confidence score is shown for AI tags, search results or clause suggestions. Section 12.3 of Onit's services agreement says output may be incomplete, inaccurate or biased and leaves review to the customer, and section 12.4 lets Onit change models or prompts without notice. Snippet View shows tagged values in context across agreements so a person can check them. Nothing says what tagging does with a date it cannot find or a clause it cannot classify, which matters because tagged renewal and termination dates drive the date alerts.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations in output from this product?
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record addressing fabricated or hallucinated legal citations produced by this product has been located as of the date shown. This is a statement about the public record on that one subject, not a finding about the product, and this signal is not a litigation history.
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 ContractWorks, SecureDocs or Onit. This is a statement about the public record rather than a finding about the product, and it covers fabricated content only. ContractWorks stores and tags contracts rather than producing court filings, so its output does not ordinarily reach a brief.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
Public materials refer to professional responsibility in general terms without naming guidance.
Section 4.14 of Onit's services agreement states that Onit is not a law firm and does not offer legal advice, recommendations, opinions, representation, referrals or counseling, and section 12.3 tells customers to obtain legal or other professional advice as appropriate when relying on AI output. No bar opinion, ethics rule or professional conduct guidance is named on the ContractWorks pages or in Onit's agreements, and nothing connects the product to a lawyer's duties when using AI tags or clauses.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
The product does not touch a fee between a lawyer and a client. It operates before an engagement exists, or it is bought by a team that bills no client for the work. Savings claims aimed at the buyer’s own cost are recorded in the summary and do not make the row a savings claim, because no client bill is in the loop.
ContractWorks is bought by organizations to manage their own contracts across legal, HR, sales, finance and nonprofit teams, and its named customers are companies and a nonprofit rather than law firms, so no client bill sits in the loop. Its savings claims are aimed at the buyer's own time, such as 80 percent faster contract workflows and at least 100 hours saved. Its contract tagging service, run by legal engineers and licensed attorneys, is a service sold to the customer. Nothing published addresses fee treatment of AI assisted work for a firm that bills a client.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
A subprocessor and model provider list plus client facing disclosure material is published or available without an agreement in place.
Onit publishes a dated subprocessor list, updated 17 August 2026, with a table for the SecureDocs platform that runs ContractWorks and a table for the AXDRAFT platform that runs ContractWorks Premium, and names OpenAI as the AI provider across all platforms with its locations. Customers can subscribe to email change notices. The services agreement and data processing addendum are published, and the addendum lets customers rely on recent SSAE 18 reports in place of an on site audit.
ContractWorks offers a downloadable security specification PDF. A customer can forward these to its own clients without an agreement in place.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
Some elements of the record are available, short of a document level export.
ContractWorks records every click in an audit trail with user, date, time and action, which administrators can export to Excel or have emailed daily, and Premium keeps version control across redlines with third parties invited to collaborate without signing in. Nothing published says whether a tag or clause added by AI is marked as machine generated in that trail, or which model produced it, and section 12.2 of Onit's agreement says Onit has no duty to retain AI output unless the service provides retention and it is enabled.
No export or template for disclosing AI use is published. ContractWorks output is a contract repository and reports rather than court filings.