Tellepsen Cuts Contract Review Time by 60% with Saige Assist
“I have much more confidence working in IntelAgree. Before, I would always say, 'Sure, we can do that.' Now it's, 'Yeah, absolutely, we can get through this. I can turn that around very quickly, not a problem.'”
About Tellepsen
Tellepsen is a full-service commercial construction company in Houston, Texas, providing general contracting and construction management on projects from small renovations to large greenfield builds. Founded in 1909, the family-owned company has operated for more than a century across four generations. Its projects include the University of Houston Student Center Transformation, the Houston Zoo's Galapagos exhibit, and Texas Children's Hospital - The Woodlands Campus.
Overview
Every contract Tellepsen signs with a project owner crosses Contracts Manager Melinda Decker’s desk. Before IntelAgree, she carefully reviewed each agreement from start to finish, sometimes dedicating five hours to a single contract. She managed requests and tracked contract status through email and Excel, making her the central source for updates about contract progress and redline approvals.
With IntelAgree, Decker centralized intake, version history, and contract search while translating Tellepsen’s negotiating positions into playbooks for each contract type. Saige Assist applies these rules across every agreement, surfaces relevant clauses, and suggests redlines for her review. Decker evaluates every recommendation, retains final approval, and now completes reviews in about two hours instead of five.
Her expertise now supports faster answers across the business, too. With Saige Assist: Contract Advice, Decker asks questions about existing agreements in plain language and quickly gives colleagues the information they need. She can now answer a builder’s risk question in five minutes or less — a task that previously took 15 minutes.
Key Challenges
- Full manual review of each contract, sometimes taking up to five hours
- Limited confidence from general-purpose AI tools
- Email-based requests and redline handoffs, tracked in an Excel sheet
Full Control of Every Redline with Saige Assist & Playbooks
For Tellepsen, project type determines which provisions require the closest attention. On a guaranteed-maximum-price job, questions about cost of work, general conditions, and the owner’s audit rights matter far more than they do on a lump-sum job. Public projects also require a different approach because municipalities and state-funded owners may impose requirements that Tellepsen cannot negotiate.
Before IntelAgree, Decker started each contract review with the table of contents and a short list of priority provisions, then scanned the rest. As she reviewed, she often questioned whether another edit was necessary or whether she was asking for too much. Decker used general-purpose AI tools to review individual sections, but she still read every contract from start to finish to make sure the tools had not missed anything.
"I was always skeptical that other AI tools were missing something,” Decker said. “Now, I have that confidence because I created the playbook. I see it taking me to the areas that I want to look at, so I don't have to read the contract from top to bottom anymore."
Decker built playbooks around her negotiating positions, which now serve as guardrails for Saige Assist. Saige Assist: Redlining suggests redlines against each playbook, and Decker decides which to accept. Because she sets the rules in the playbooks, she has confidence in what Saige Assist flags. That confidence saves her time by directing her to the clauses that need her attention most.
Her playbooks also reflect Tellepsen's negotiation approach, favoring small, targeted edits to the owner's existing wording and adding new language only when it's needed.
“I was in the driver’s seat from the get-go. I set up the rules, so I already know Saige Assist is guiding me to the things I want to look at.”
A CLM Tool Configured Around How the Team Operates
Decker chose IntelAgree over other CLM platforms for its ease of use. Versions, redlining, and attributes appear on the same screen, with search and navigation in view, so she doesn’t have to juggle platforms. Attributes — the data fields that hold a contract's key terms — also influenced her decision because she could define them and control how IntelAgree presents information.
IntelAgree's implementation guide first walked Decker through contract types, templates, and legal entities before moving on to attributes. She configured the attributes with the executive summary in mind.
“I wanted the executive summary to look a certain way. The implementation team was really great about working with me until it presented the information the way we wanted to see it.”
With the attributes in place, she can see a contract's key information quickly.
IntelAgree also replaced emailed redline handoffs between Decker and Tellepsen’s director of risk with one shared document. Decker applies the edits she keeps from Saige Assist: Editing directly in Word with “Track Changes” enabled, then opens the agreement in IntelAgree’s co-editing feature for the director’s review. Because they work from the same document, Decker always has the latest version and can return agreements to the operations team faster.
Contract Questions Answered in Minutes with Saige Assist
Before IntelAgree, colleagues emailed Decker or stopped by her office often to request a blank contract draft or a quick review. She logged each request in an Excel sheet, then fielded questions about whether the contract had moved forward or anyone had approved the redlines. To find the answers, she repeatedly found herself searching through her email.
SharePoint made finding contracts even harder. "They just live there and exist. They're not dynamic," Decker said. "You can't pull information from them without opening each individual file and reading it." When someone asked about an older contract without providing the job number, Decker sometimes searched multiple systems and waited for archived files to open, spending up to 30 minutes just locating the right agreement. Now, she can search IntelAgree, immediately open the right contract, and view its versions in one place.
Colleagues in different departments also frequently ask Decker about liquidated damages and builder's risk. She now directs those questions to Saige Assist: Contract Advice.
“If I want to know something, I can navigate to the contract with the search feature and ask [Saige Assist] Contract Advice what it says on builder’s risk. I get my answer a lot faster than I would from our SharePoint file structure.”
Decker estimates that answering a builder's risk question now takes five minutes or less. When someone asks about a legacy agreement, she can search by the owner's name — even without the project name — and retrieve the contract to compare old versus new terms.
Since going live, Tellepsen's preconstruction managers, project executives and project accountants have been moving contract requests from email to IntelAgree. The group handles about a dozen owner contracts and a similar number of subcontracts each month, so Decker expects the new process to end that email pileup. She has also built templates for subcontractors working under master agreements, allowing colleagues to enter the required details and generate agreements themselves.
“I don’t like cumbersome processes, and if there is a better way to get from point A to point B without sacrificing anything, I’m all for it. We’ve found that with IntelAgree.”