Olsson Reviews Routine Contracts in ~15 Minutes with IntelAgree

The challenge

About Olsson

Olsson is an engineering and design firm founded in 1956 in Lincoln, Nebraska. Ranked in the top 75 ENR (Engineering News Record), it employs more than 2,000 people and performs work from coast to coast. Its work spans planning, engineering, environmental, and field services across sectors including transportation, water, and energy.

Overview

Olsson has been an engineering and design firm since 1956, but its contract review team is just over a decade old. Often, someone brings them a question about an agreement signed before the team even existed. The contract is still active, but the answer is buried in pages no one has opened in years. Answering used to mean reading the whole document by hand, and as the firm’s contract volume increased, the time to do that kept shrinking.

Melissa Griffith Phelps, Contracts & Risk Management Senior Coordinator at Olsson, saw a chance to change that. After an eight-month search for CLM software, she and her team chose IntelAgree largely for how much they could configure themselves — building their own playbooks and data-extraction attributes, and editing rules.

The team onboarded IntelAgree the way they would a new hire, starting with their lowest-risk weekly contracts. IntelAgree now takes the first pass on those, dropping an hours-long review into minutes, while reviewers lean on Saige Assist to explain what an unfamiliar clause actually means.

Challenges

• A fully manual redlining process, with standard agreements taking up to two hours each
• Rapidly growing contract volume, with weekly demand outpacing a small team’s capacity
• A rising volume of complex clauses reviewed entirely in-house

The solution

Routine Contracts, Reviewed in Minutes

For most of Olsson’s history, contract review was manual work. Reviewers learned the clauses on the job and redlined by hand, and a single agreement could take up to twenty hours. Olsson’s executive vice president of innovation and technology urged teams to treat AI as a junior colleague, so Griffith Phelps’s team took the time to train IntelAgree the way they would any new hire.

They started with the most routine work — the public agreements and NDAs that make up about a quarter of the 70 to 90 contracts they review each week. IntelAgree now takes the first pass on those, cutting a one-to-two-hour review to roughly 15 minutes and freeing the team to focus on higher-risk work.

That first pass also produces an executive summary built from the roughly 25 attributes the team has flagged as most important. Instead of combing through a dense agreement, the project managers get the essentials in one place, from payment terms to confidentiality.

On high-volume weeks, when fatigue sets in, IntelAgree helps the team move through lower-risk contracts with more confidence and less fear.

“This is a contract from a public agency we’ve seen ten times. I can run it through IntelAgree, make sure nothing’s changed, and know there’s nothing we’ve missed,” Griffith Phelps said.

The reclaimed time also made room for onboarding an intern, something the team had wanted for years.

“I’m not sure we could have brought on an intern, and given her the meaningful experience she deserves, if we hadn’t found IntelAgree,” Griffith Phelps added.

Clear Answers on Every Unfamiliar Clause with Saige Assist

The clauses that slow Olsson’s reviewers down most are the ones they’ve never seen before. Those clauses turn up more and more, especially for an engineering and design firm, as new AI and intellectual-property terms work their way into everyday contracts.

“Saige Assist helps us understand a new clause and flags the risks we might not think of, so we can redline it or talk it through the right way,” Griffith Phelps explained.

Most of that work happens right in Microsoft Word, where a reviewer can revise a clause as they read it.

“My team definitely uses Saige Assist: Editing the most,” said Griffith Phelps. “They really like being able to highlight a clause, get high-level information on it, and know whether we need to talk it through as a team or just mark it up on the spot.”

The team relies on it for the hardest agreements, too. One reviewer who handles contracts built on third-party templates uses Saige Assist: Editing to work through complex terms like liquidated damages, highlighting a difficult clause, and getting back a usable redline instead of starting from scratch.

Fast Answers from Decade-Old Contracts

Some of the team’s hardest questions come from its oldest contracts. Because Olsson’s contract group is younger than many of the agreements it now oversees, a project manager often needs to know what a document signed years ago committed the firm to.

For those questions, the team uses Saige Assist: Contract Advice. For example, in one older contract, nothing was labeled “intellectual property,” but the tool pointed the team to a related clause about work ownership instead. Before, finding that answer meant reading the entire contract; now it takes about ten minutes.

“Saige Assist is smart enough to be able to take things from a contract and understand it adjacently,” Griffith Phelps said.

About 90 days past launch, the team still meets with IntelAgree each month to keep adoption on track.

“It’s been a very successful first year. I’m looking forward to the next couple of years, and to growing with the platform,” Griffith Phelps said.

The results

The reclaimed time also made room for onboarding an intern, something the team had wanted for years. About 90 days past launch, the team still meets with IntelAgree each month to keep adoption on track.