Challenge
TriHealth’s legal team faced three major hurdles:
- High volume and complexity: Clinical trial agreements and other long-form vendor contracts with dozens and dozens of pages. These contracts require review of not just commercial terms but also compliance-heavy clauses, such as HIPAA obligations, data privacy, and Medicare/Medicaid debarment exclusions, careful analysis for indemnification clauses, IP ownership, publication rights, HIPAA compliance and exclusions for Medicare/Medicaid debarment.
- Manual reviews: With Clinical Trial Agreements, attorneys relied on checklists or attach the organization’s standard terms and conditions attached as exhibits, which were often rejected by sponsors. Redlining every provision was time‑consuming, forcing the team to compare vendor paper manually.
- Tight turnaround expectations: The legal team must provide internal business owners an initial review within 10 days. However, this tight turnaround time adds to the strain of their work, because they are also responsible for acquisitions, committee work, legal interpretation and risk management across the enterprise.
Missed clauses, delayed reviews and diverging attorney approaches created frustration among business stakeholders and increased compliance risk.
Solution
After vetting multiple AI solutions, TriHealth selected LegalOn Review to speed up contracting without sacrificing legal judgment or regulatory compliance. Key factors in their choice:
- Expert‑built content: LegalOn’s playbooks and AI models are crafted by attorneys, covering hundreds of common issues across clinical trial, employment, SaaS and services contracts.
- Playbook flexibility: TriHealth’s team runs LegalOn’s pre‑built playbooks alongside their own. They can layer their standard terms and conditions and apply them selectively depending on the contract type.
- Attorney in control: The system highlights high‑ and medium‑risk clauses and proposes model language, but attorneys decide what to accept or revise. This ensures compliance decisions stay with humans.
- Integrated tools: LegalOn Assistant summarises redlines and generates email‑ready explanations, saving attorneys from drafting summary emails by hand.
“Attorneys were building out the content, and it wasn’t just scouring the internet for answers. Another big factor for us too was the way LegalOn is set up — the attorney is still in the driver’s seat, so it’s not this, you know, click a button and it automatically does everything.” — Joseph Sgro
Implementation
Getting started was easy. As Associate General Counsel Joe Sgro noted, “Once you have access, you can use it.” TriHealth uploaded existing templates, built a playbook for its standard terms and immediately began reviewing contracts. Attorneys continue to refine their playbooks incrementally while relying on LegalOn’s alerts to catch issues they hadn’t previously considered.
Results
Since adopting LegalOn, TriHealth has recorded significant improvements:
- 75 % reduction in review time: Clinical trial agreements that once took hours can now be reviewed in about 20 minutes. Across all contract types, turnaround times have dropped dramatically.
- Improved consistency: By running every agreement against the same playbooks, TriHealth’s attorneys apply uniform standards. This reduces disparities between reviewers and helps enforce internal policies like excluded‑provider requirements and network‑access rules.
- Higher‑quality reviews: LegalOn’s alerts catch missing clauses, such as anti‑kickback provisions, insurance thresholds or access‑to‑records requirements, that attorneys might otherwise overlook. The system also harmonizes language with defined terms and list structures, saving manual editing.
- Freed legal capacity: Faster reviews allow attorneys to focus on other critical tasks, such as acquisitions, committee work and regulatory counsel. They’re exploring ways for project managers or paralegals to run initial AI reviews before attorney sign‑off, further extending capacity.
“LegalOn’s alerts may catch something I wasn’t even thinking about or that isn’t in our playbook. It really is like having another set of eyes on every contract.” — Joseph Sgro
The Game‑Changer
For TriHealth’s team, LegalOn’s AI review and redlining capabilities have been transformational. The system not only flags omissions but proposes aligned language and explains the legal rationale. The built‑in Assistant summarizes redlines, enabling attorneys to use polished feedback directly in an email rather than drafting it from scratch. This extra set of AI‑powered eyes boosts confidence that no critical term is missed, and it does so in minutes, not hours.
Looking Ahead
TriHealth plans to push every contract through LegalOn and expand its library of custom playbooks. They’re also exploring delegating the first‑pass review to paralegals or project managers, further streamlining the process. With LegalOn, TriHealth has turned contract review from a bottleneck into a strategic advantage, allowing its small legal team to deliver faster, more consistent and more compliant results for the entire health system.
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