Typically, when we describe a company as \u201cconservative,\u201d we\u2019re talking about a company refusing to use the cloud because they\u2019re imaging all the servers falling into the sea. So it\u2019s a little hard to accept the adjective being applied to a company trying to turn over its contract negotiating to fast-paced hallucination machines. <\/p>\n
Spellbook<\/a> CEO Scott Stevenson shared a highlight from this week\u2019s sales call:<\/p>\n Biggest surprise on a Spellbook sales call this week:<\/p>\n “Can your agent negotiate with the counterparty automatically? We want it to send redlines without human intervention. We think agent-to-agent negotiation is the future.”<\/p>\n From a conservative Fortune 500 healthcare company<\/p>\n \u2014 Scott Stevenson (@scottastevenson) October 24, 2026<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n This is a little shocking. Than again, an industry that\u2019s based upon gouging people with terminal illnesses enters with a fairly dim view of humanity so maybe this tracks. UnitedHealth faces a proposed class action alleging it used an algorithm called nH Predict to cut off post-acute care<\/a> for Medicare Advantage patients, with the complaint claiming more than 90 percent of those denials were overturned on appeal.<\/p>\n To be clear, Spellbook isn\u2019t selling a solution this radical. Its newly released \u201cAutonomous Contract Management\u201d product reviews counterparty redlines the moment they come back<\/a> and checks them against a playbook \u2014 a genuinely useful AI application \u2014 but then it marks routine deals \u201cready to approve.\u201d And by \u201cready to approve,\u201d they mean have a human lawyer practice real judgment<\/em>. This \u201cconservative\u201d client apparently longs for an option that skips the approval button.<\/p>\n The tweet doesn\u2019t clarify the role of this anonymous inquisitor. One hopes it wasn\u2019t the general counsel, openly pining for an opportunity to engage in a little unauthorized practice of law. In-house counsel get a bad rap as the \u201cDepartment of No,\u201d but this course correction should stop short of \u201cDepartment of No Worries.\u201d<\/p>\n Later in the comments, Stevenson clarified that the client was only talking about \u201cNDAs and simple MSAs,\u201d which are admittedly fairly boilerplate. On the other hand, streamlining NDAs sounds like the beginning of a story that ends with Harvey Weinstein. Business confidentiality agreements aren\u2019t the same as buying a contractual coverup, of course, but one of the undersold lessons of the Weinstein debacle is that these agreements cause damage in large part because<\/em> everyone treats them as boilerplate that nobody bothers to read. The stakes may be much lower in these agreements, but the vector to causing damage is the same.<\/p>\n And there\u2019s the added risk of opening the company up to prompt injection. Morgan Lewis recently warned that hidden text buried in a document can steer an AI away from its user\u2019s instructions<\/a> and flagged contracts as a key exposure point. The firm did not think any current product can be assumed to reliably catch the problem. That may or may not be true, BUT it is true that every time a product adjusts to fix a vulnerability, someone else is going to invent a new avenue to get behind that wall.<\/p>\n Which is how AI tools that speed up the process, while maintaining human involvement, should improve outcomes. A human reviewing the 400th NDA of the afternoon is mostly skimming these things anyway. Using technology to give the human an easier and more informed starting point on each agreement almost certainly improves the chances that nothing gets missed. And, of course, the human can see when the 399th agreement looks weird.<\/p>\n But this tweet is still a little scary. There are clients out there \u2014 with money \u2014 who want to throw caution to the wind. Well, correction: that\u2019s scary for transactional lawyers. <\/p>\n For litigators and bankruptcy attorneys this could be a real boon!<\/p>\n The post Fortune 500 Healthcare Company Asks For AI To Negotiate Contracts With No Human Lawyers<\/a> appeared first on Above the Law<\/a>.<\/p>\n Typically, when we describe a company as \u201cconservative,\u201d we\u2019re talking about a company refusing to use the cloud because they\u2019re imaging all the servers falling into the sea. So it\u2019s a little hard to accept the adjective being applied to a company trying to turn over its contract negotiating to fast-paced hallucination machines. <\/p>\n Spellbook<\/a> CEO Scott Stevenson shared a highlight from this week\u2019s sales call:<\/p>\n This is a little shocking. Than again, an industry that\u2019s based upon gouging people with terminal illnesses enters with a fairly dim view of humanity so maybe this tracks. UnitedHealth faces a proposed class action alleging it used an algorithm called nH Predict to cut off post-acute care<\/a> for Medicare Advantage patients, with the complaint claiming more than 90 percent of those denials were overturned on appeal.<\/p>\n\n