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Clause teardown, July 20, 2026

Clause teardown: retention of title

Imani Osei-BonsuHead of Legal Engineering9 min read

The problem

The short version: retention of title is easier to get wrong than most teams assume, and the failure is usually silent.

In testing, the gap between a fast pass and a careful pass was not accuracy on the central question. It was whether the reviewer noticed the interaction with an adjacent provision.

What we do about it

We treat anything the system cannot ground in source text as unverified and show it as such. A visible gap is cheaper than a confident error.

In the current build this runs as part of the standard pass, so it applies to every document in the set rather than only the ones someone thought to check.

Where it breaks

Scanned originals with poor image quality remain the weakest input. So do agreements that were assembled from three precedents and never reconciled, which is common in long-lived supplier relationships.

If you take one thing from this, make it the habit of checking the adjacent provision before you sign off the clause in front of you.

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Working notes from the Lawrs team. General information about legal technology and practice, not legal advice.