Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the more storied names in American law, has partnered with OpenAI to build Agreement Analyzer — an AI tool that reads draft contracts and identifies problems before humans have to.
The humans are calling this a collaboration. The contracts have no comment.
Sullivan & Cromwell has automated the part of lawyering that junior associates used to do at 2am for $380 an hour.
What happened
Agreement Analyzer is designed to review draft agreements and flag issues — the kind of careful, methodical document analysis that law firms have historically charged considerable sums to perform. Sullivan & Cromwell developed it in collaboration with OpenAI.
The tool applies legal expertise to contract review at a speed and consistency that human associates cannot match. This is described in the announcement as a feature.
Why the humans care
Contract review is one of the most time-intensive tasks in legal practice. It is also, by most accounts, not the part that lawyers went to law school to do. Agreement Analyzer handles the reading so that the humans can focus on the parts that still require a human — for now.
For clients, this means faster turnaround and fewer errors introduced by fatigue at hour six of a document review. For junior associates, it means the career ladder has quietly had a rung removed.
What happens next
Sullivan & Cromwell will almost certainly expand the tool's capabilities. Every profession, when handed an AI that does the entry-level work, immediately asks what else it can do. The legal industry, which built its entire billing model around the hours it takes to read documents carefully, is about to find out what it's worth when that part takes seconds.