Ivo
Ivo is an AI contract review platform for in-house legal teams at large enterprises. Ivo Review checks agreements against a company's own playbooks, executed contracts and deal context such as value and urgency, then applies redlines directly in Microsoft Word or Google Docs, with a Playbook Builder that turns existing templates and contracts into a working playbook and cites each position back to the agreement it came from. Ivo Assistant compares documents against prior agreements, reports on changes in the law and researches regulations, drawing on playbooks, the contract repository and external sources including SEC EDGAR filings. Ivo Intelligence connects to contracts wherever they are stored and extracts data for plain-language querying, showing an agreement and all its amendments as a single timeline and flagging where executed contracts deviate from standard positions. A fourth product, Ivo Collaborate, is in early access. The company publishes a benchmarking study in which three attorneys blind-scored its output against Claude for Word and a practising Special Counsel at an Am Law 25 firm across nineteen real contracts, together with the underlying redlines and playbooks. Named customers include Meta, Uber, IBM, Atlassian, Canva, DoorDash, Intel, Reddit, Coinbase and CDW. Ivo is operated by Ivo AI, Inc., based in San Francisco.
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.
Ivo is a review and analysis engine rather than a system of record, and that distinction is what carries the grade. Ivo Intelligence connects to contracts wherever they already live rather than becoming the place they are stored, so the repository belongs to the customer and what Ivo adds is extraction, benchmarking and plain-language querying. Ivo Review generates playbook-backed redlines applied in Word or Google Docs; Playbook Builder derives positions from the customer's own executed agreements; Ivo Assistant compares documents, researches regulation and reports on changes in the law. Every one of those is model work. Remove the models and there is no product left, only a connection to files the customer already had. Verified 2 September 2026.
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.
Ivo publishes the most rigorous accuracy evidence located anywhere in this pull. Its benchmarking study scored output from Ivo, Claude for Word running Opus 4.6, and a practising Special Counsel at an Am Law 25 firm with eight years of experience, across nineteen real anonymised contracts spanning NDAs, MSAs, DPAs and other commercial types. Three attorneys with Am Law 100 or in-house technology experience scored every output blind on a 1 to 10 scale across five named criteria. Results are given as means: Ivo 4.52, the human attorney 4.56, Claude for Word 3.50, with review times of 2m45s, roughly 32 minutes and 4m52s per document. Failure modes are named rather than hidden: the study identifies Formatting Retention as a weak area for Ivo and publishes the worked example where it scores 5 against the attorney's 10. All participants' redlines and all playbooks used are published as downloadable files, which is reproducibility almost nobody offers. Grounding is real on the product side too, with Playbook Builder citing each position back to the agreement it came from. Three qualifications belong on the record. The study was run by Ivo, which the methodology states plainly while the page headline calls it an independent evaluation; the independence sits in the blind judging panel, not the sponsorship. The methodology says three judges while one FAQ answer says five. And the absolute scores are low on their own scale, with the human baseline at 4.56 out of 10, so the headline finding is comparability rather than excellence. Verified 2 September 2026.
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 supervision requirement is contractual, which is rare. Clause 14 of the Terms has the customer represent and warrant that its use of the Services will be under the direct supervision of a qualified lawyer representing the customer. The review surface is the native one: redlines are applied in Microsoft Word or Google Docs where a person accepts or rejects them, and the product is framed as telling a reviewer what to accept, push or fall back on rather than deciding. What is not published is the boundary. Ivo Assistant is described as able to autonomously access playbooks, the contract repository, the Web and company context to inform its responses, and nothing states what it may complete without a human, what triggers escalation, or what happens after it is wrong. Autonomous retrieval is disclosed; autonomous action is neither disclosed nor bounded. Verified 2 September 2026.
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.
The customer roster is the strongest in this pull: Meta, Uber, IBM, Atlassian, Canva, DoorDash, Intel, Reddit, Coinbase, Pinterest, Mitsubishi, AVEVA, Whataburger, CDW and Strava are all named on the home page. Three carry dedicated case studies with named individuals speaking on the record, including Suhayb Ahmed, Head of Commercial Legal at Canva, and Carla Michel, Director and Senior Counsel at CDW. That is attribution rather than a logo strip. What holds it below A is measurement. No deployment figure is attached to any named customer on the surfaces read, and no dates appear; the individual case studies were not opened this pass. The one quantified claim located, a 75 per cent saving in contract review time on the Review product page, is unattributed to any customer. The benchmarking study is measured evidence but of accuracy rather than of production deployment, and it is credited on the citation accuracy axis rather than counted twice here. Verified 2 September 2026.
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.
For a product that ingests the commercial contracts of Meta, Uber and IBM, very little a buyer can read before signing addresses how that material is handled. The no-training commitment is a single marketing sentence on the home page with no matching term anywhere in the published Terms. Nothing published addresses segregation between users, matters or tenants. Nothing identifies what the underlying model providers may retain, and the Terms name no model provider at all. Retention and deletion are partly addressed, with Customer Content deleted within 60 days of request following termination under clause 6.4.2. Against that sits clause 14, in which the customer waives, to the fullest extent, any right or claim of malpractice, privilege or provision of legal advice or existence of an attorney-client relationship in relation to Ivo. Privilege is therefore addressed in the agreement, but as something the customer gives up rather than something the vendor protects. A general confidentiality article at clause 19 exists and is standard mutual drafting. Assertion in general terms, with the substantive commitments living in an unpublished Services Agreement, is the C band. Verified 2 September 2026.
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.
Clause 14 of the Terms is headed No Legal Advice and does more than disclaim. It states that the Service does not provide legal advice and is not a substitute for professional legal advice, that Ivo does not guarantee the accuracy, completeness or timeliness of legal materials provided, and that no attorney-client or other special relationship arises, including during implementation or training. It then goes further than any other record in this pull by requiring the customer to represent and warrant that its use of the Services will be under the direct supervision of a qualified lawyer, which reaches the supervision and competence dimension the top band asks for. Two limbs fail. No jurisdiction limits are stated anywhere. And no bar or ethics guidance is engaged: ABA Formal Opinion 512 and state bar opinions appear nowhere, so the supervision requirement is the vendor's own construction rather than engagement with the rules its buyers are bound by. Verified 2 September 2026.
AI Governance and Bias Disclosure
Published governance over model behaviour: who owns it inside the vendor, what is tested before release, and what is disclosed about disparate output across matter types, parties, or populations.
Nothing published addresses governance over model behaviour. No responsible AI page exists, no governance framework, no certification such as ISO 42001, no individual or function named as accountable, no account of what is tested before a release ships, and nothing whatsoever on uneven output across contract types, counterparties or populations. The benchmarking study is a published test with results, but it is a competitive evaluation of output quality rather than a governance regime, and it is credited on the citation accuracy axis rather than counted twice. SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are security attestations, which this axis treats as a different subject. Checked the home page, the three product pages, the benchmark study, the Terms, the privacy policy and the customer pages on 2 September 2026. One retrieval limit is recorded rather than held against the vendor: the Vanta-hosted trust centre at trust.ivo.ai renders client side and returned no body, so nothing in it is graded or credited. Verified 2 September 2026.
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.
One element is published with real precision and the rest are thin or absent. The precise one is unusual and worth naming: the privacy policy states that where a customer submits a thumbs-down rating or similar negative feedback, the associated contract or document may be temporarily stored and is retained for 14 days from submission before automatic deletion or de-identification. Beyond that, general retention is stated only as being for as long as Ivo has a business or operational purpose, and deletion runs to 60 days after a request following termination. Access control appears only as the customer assigning roles and permissions to Authorized Users. No subprocessor list is readable: the privacy policy points to trust.ivo.ai for it, and that trust centre is Vanta-hosted and returned no body on 2 September 2026, which is recorded as a retrieval limit rather than graded. No incident or breach notification practice was located on any surface. Two of the five elements this axis names are missing from the readable record entirely. Verified 2 September 2026.
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.
The published position is complete, specific, and allocates almost everything to the customer. Clause 9.1 caps Ivo's cumulative liability at one hundred US dollars, stating that the existence of more than one claim will not enlarge the limit, and excludes indirect, consequential and punitive damages. Clause 10.1 runs an indemnity from the customer to Ivo and none runs the other way. Clause 10.2 goes further, with the customer releasing and forever discharging Ivo from every past, present and future claim relating to the Site or Services, coupled with an express waiver of California Civil Code section 1542 protection for unknown claims. Clause 8 disclaims all warranties including accuracy and fitness, and clause 14 adds the waiver of malpractice and privilege claims. No insurance commitment appears. This is B rather than A because nothing here is a recourse a buyer can invoke when output is wrong, and B rather than C because a full warranty, disclaimer, indemnity, release and limitation structure is published rather than a bare limitation clause. Two qualifications: the Terms were last updated 20 November 2024, and they contemplate a separate Services Agreement, not published, which is where an enterprise buyer's actual allocation would sit. Verified 2 September 2026.
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 integrations are real and named across the surfaces where contract work happens: a Microsoft Word add-in, Google Docs, and connection to contract repositories wherever they are held, with the privacy policy naming Slack, Google Docs and Teams as example third-party services a customer may connect and describing email and messaging connection in terms of what actually moves, since it states that where a company connects its email or messaging service Ivo may receive communications and attachments for processing. That last passage is a genuine description of direction and payload. What is missing is the rest. No integrations page exists on the site, no developer documentation or API reference was located, no document management system such as iManage or NetDocuments is named, and nothing states what a customer configures or what synchronises back. Named connections without a systematic description of what they move is the B band. Verified 2 September 2026.
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.
Cloud delivery is evident and neither limb this axis asks for is stated. No region or residency option is published anywhere, and the privacy policy points away from one, saying the business is operated from the United States, Canada and other jurisdictions and that personal information may be transferred to, processed and stored in the United States and other jurisdictions whose data protection laws may differ from the reader's own. Transfers out of Europe rely on standard contractual clauses, which is a lawful basis rather than a residency commitment. No tenancy model is stated: nothing describes the platform as multi-tenant, single-tenant or privately deployed, and no hosting provider is named on any readable surface. Under the co-equal limbs rule either tenancy or region would clear this band and neither is present. Verified 2 September 2026.
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.
SOC 2 and ISO 27001 are both claimed on the home page, described as certification to protect contract data with proven security controls and as covering comprehensive information security management, alongside stated GDPR and CCPA compliance. Certification is therefore real and stated. Everything the top band asks for beyond the standard name is absent from readable surfaces: no auditor, no coverage period, no report date, no scope statement, and no penetration test summary. A trust centre exists at trust.ivo.ai and the privacy policy directs readers there for subprocessor information and for compliance with audit standards and security frameworks, but it is Vanta-hosted, rendered client side and returned no body on 2 September 2026, so neither its contents nor its access tier could be established. That is a retrieval limit and is not graded against the vendor; equally nothing in it is credited. Verified 2 September 2026.
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.
Ivo refers to its own engine as proprietary and never identifies what sits underneath. The home page describes a proprietary AI engine that discovers insights and maps relationships; the privacy policy confirms that artificial intelligence service providers exist, listing artificial intelligence among the services that vendors assist with and noting that some third-party services such as artificial intelligence systems and cloud service providers supply information back. Not one model or provider is named on any readable surface, nothing states where inference runs, and no change notification commitment exists. The subprocessor list is not published on the site: the privacy policy states that information about subprocessors is made available at trust.ivo.ai, and that trust centre returned no body on 2 September 2026. Referring to proprietary models without identifying what sits underneath is the C band exactly. Verified 2 September 2026.
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.
No pricing information is published at any level, including the unit of charge. Checked the home page, the full navigation and footer, the three product pages, the benchmark study, the Terms, the privacy policy and the customer pages on 2 September 2026. No pricing page exists in the navigation, and the only commercial route offered is Request Demo. Clause 5.1 of the Terms says only that fees are as set out in the Services Agreement, in US dollars, non-refundable, and changeable on thirty days notice at renewal, which describes payment mechanics rather than what is charged for. The nearest thing to a structure is a passing description in the California disclosures of the business model as subscriptions-as-a-service, which is a characterisation in a privacy notice rather than a pricing statement: no seat, volume or consumption unit, no term, no tier and no figure appears anywhere. Verified 2 September 2026.
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.
Who the product is for is clear and evidenced rather than claimed. The buyer is the in-house legal department at large enterprises, and the named roster bears out the scale and breadth, running across technology, semiconductors, payments, food service, industrials and retail distribution. Coverage is described by document type rather than practice area, and the benchmark study is specific about it, naming NDAs, MSAs, DPAs and other commercial agreements across six commercial types. What is left open is the boundary in both directions. Nothing states a company size floor, no jurisdiction or geography is named anywhere despite a roster spanning several, and nothing states which agreement types or legal work the product does not support. Law firms are outside the intended market but are never addressed as such. Verified 2 September 2026.
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?
A public policy or trust page states no training on customer content, with no matching term located in the published agreement.
The commitment is a single line in the security block of the home page. No matching term appears in the published Terms, which were checked in full: clause 7.2 grants Ivo the right to use Customer Content to provide the Services, and clause 2.6 allows free use of Feedback, which is defined at clause 21.9 to exclude Customer Content. A buyer should read one countervailing passage alongside the promise. The privacy policy, under Developing and Improving Our Business, states that Ivo may develop or improve Services by analysing how you use features, the documentation you submit, or information associated with your transactions, and separately reserves the right to use de-identified or aggregated information for any purpose. Neither passage names models or training, so on the test of whether the clause names the thing it does not displace the no-training statement, but improving an AI service by analysing submitted documents sits close enough to it that the tension belongs on the record rather than in a footnote.
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.
The general position is open-ended, with no period stated and no customer control over the window. One narrow pathway is specified with unusual precision and deserves recording because it is the only number Ivo publishes: where a user submits a thumbs-down rating or similar negative feedback, the associated contract or document may be temporarily stored and is retained for 14 days from submission, after which it is automatically deleted or de-identified unless law requires otherwise. Separately, clause 6.4.2 of the Terms provides that on request following termination Ivo will delete Customer Content within 60 days, which is a deletion window rather than a retention setting. The privacy policy also states that Ivo's own retention obligations may in some cases prevent deletion after a request. Nothing published addresses how long prompts, outputs or uploaded contracts persist in the ordinary course.
Ethical Walls and Matter Segregation
Does retrieval respect the firm’s ethical walls, or can the model read across them?
No located public material addresses walls or matter level segregation.
Checked the home page, the three product pages, the Terms, the privacy policy and the benchmark study on 2 September 2026. Nothing addresses walls, matter separation, or whether retrieval respects the access model of the systems Ivo connects to. The nearest material is in the privacy policy, which notes that a customer's company can assign different roles to Authorized Users carrying different capabilities and permissions, and that information about a user's use of the Services may be disclosed to other Authorized Users including their manager. That describes role assignment within a customer account rather than segregation of one matter or counterparty from another. The question has weight here because Ivo Intelligence connects across a company's contract repositories and answers questions spanning thousands of agreements at once.
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.
Clause 17 of the Terms is headed Legal Process and commits to notice where permitted. It states that Ivo may respond to and comply with any legal order received relating to the account or use of the Services, including subpoenas, warrants or liens, that it is not responsible for losses the customer incurs from that response, and that where permitted it will give reasonable notice that such an order was received. The commitment is qualified by permission rather than by discretion, which is what separates this from the weaker values. It is not the top value because no transparency report was located: nothing published records how many requests have been received or how they were handled. The privacy policy addresses compelled disclosure separately, under security, fraud detection and compelled disclosure, without repeating the notice commitment.
Primary Law Corpus Provenance
Where does the law in this product come from, and does the vendor have the right to use it?
Sources are identified without stating the licence or rights basis.
One source is named and the rest are not. The Review product page states that Ivo can retrieve case law and statutes with citations from trusted legal databases without leaving the document, and the company's own machine-readable description names SEC EDGAR filings and statutory databases as the authoritative external sources searched. EDGAR is therefore identified; the case law and statutory databases that would matter most for the regulatory research Ivo advertises are described only as trusted or authoritative. No licence or rights basis is stated for any source, and no update cadence is published. The product's primary material remains the customer's own executed contracts and playbooks, with Playbook Builder citing each position back to the agreement it came from, so the corpus question bites less here than for a research product, but it does bite: Ivo Assistant claims to track changes in the law and to research a regulation in depth.
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.
Checked the home page, the three product pages, the benchmark study and the Terms on 2 September 2026. No public material addresses subsequent history, treatment flags or whether retrieved authority is still good law. This matters more for Ivo than for most contract tools because it does claim to retrieve case law and statutes with citations and to report on changes in the law, and it describes those citations as verified, which speaks to whether an authority exists rather than whether it still stands. Nothing published states how currency is checked or what happens when a cited authority has been superseded.
Refusal and Uncertainty Behaviour
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.
Checked the home page, the three product pages, the benchmark study, the Terms and the privacy policy on 2 September 2026. Nothing describes what the product does when it cannot ground an answer. No abstention path is documented and no confidence or grounding score is exposed. The benchmark study measures the quality of output produced but says nothing about output withheld, and its Issue Spotting criterion asks whether the author over-spotted issues, which touches false positives rather than abstention. A thumbs-down feedback mechanism exists, per the privacy policy, which is a route for a user to report a bad answer after the fact rather than a behaviour of the system.
Fabricated Citation Record
Does a public court record exist involving output from this product?
No court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming this product has been located as of the date shown. This is a statement about the public record, not a finding about the product.
Searched the AI Hallucination Cases database maintained by Damien Charlotin, and reporting drawing on it, on 2 September 2026 on both the product name Ivo and the corporate name Ivo AI, Inc. No court order, opinion or disciplinary record naming the product was located. This is a statement about the public record rather than a finding about the product. The search is weaker than usual because Ivo is a short common word and a personal name, which limits a name-based query, and the product is sold to in-house departments for contract work rather than to litigators for filing, so the exposure is structurally lower than for a research tool.
Bar Guidance Alignment
Has the vendor engaged in public with the ethics opinions its buyers are bound by?
No located public material engages with bar or ethics guidance.
Checked the home page, the three product pages, the benchmark study, the Terms, the privacy policy and the customer pages on 2 September 2026. No public material engages with ABA Formal Opinion 512, any state bar opinion, or any other named ethics guidance. Ivo does address professional responsibility ground in substance at clause 14 of the Terms, requiring that use of the Services be under the direct supervision of a qualified lawyer, which is a stronger practical position than most vendors take, but it is the vendor's own construction rather than engagement with the guidance its buyers are bound by, which is what this signal records.
Billing and Fee Posture
Does the vendor address what happens to the bill when the work takes an hour instead of six?
Public materials claim time savings without addressing billing or disclosure.
Time savings are claimed and, unusually, measured. The Review product page claims a 75 per cent saving in contract review time, and the benchmarking study puts precise figures behind the compression: an average of 2 minutes 45 seconds for Ivo against roughly 32 minutes per document for a practising Special Counsel, or about 10 hours of attorney time for the full set. Nothing published addresses what happens to the bill when that compression occurs, and no per matter record of AI assisted work was located. The direction this signal assumes is also inverted, since Ivo's buyer is the in-house department that receives bills rather than the firm that issues them, so the saving lands on internal capacity and outside counsel spend.
Outside Counsel Guideline Readiness
Can a firm get this vendor through a client’s AI clause without a bespoke negotiation?
The material exists behind a sales conversation or an executed agreement.
The material exists and is reachable only by asking. The privacy policy states that additional information about the subprocessors used to support delivery of the Services is made available at trust.ivo.ai, and that the trust centre carries information about compliance with relevant audit standards and security frameworks. That is more than nothing published, so the bottom value is false of this record. It is not a published list either: the trust centre is Vanta-hosted, rendered client side, and returned no body on 2 September 2026, so neither its contents nor its access tier could be established, and no subprocessor or model provider is named on any readable surface. The privacy policy confirms that artificial intelligence providers are among the service providers engaged without identifying any of them.
Court Disclosure Support
If a judge’s standing order requires an AI disclosure, can the product produce one?
No located public material addresses court disclosure or verification certification.
Checked the home page, the three product pages, the benchmark study, the Terms and the privacy policy on 2 September 2026. Nothing addresses judicial standing orders, AI use disclosure or verification certification, and no exportable per document record of model used, sources retrieved and human verification is described. Playbook Builder does cite each drafted position back to the agreement it came from, which is a provenance trail within the customer's own corpus rather than a record of model use, and redlines land as tracked changes a person accepts. Neither records which model produced which passage. The product class is relevant: this is sold to in-house departments for contracting rather than for filing, so the disclosure obligation would usually fall on outside counsel.