Skip to content
Writing

Field guide, August 8, 2026

Field guide: identifying undischarged planning conditions

Callum WhitfieldLitigation Practice Lead8 min read

The problem

Every review team we work with has a version of this problem. Identifying undischarged planning conditions rarely announces itself.

What makes this hard is that the signal is distributed. A single clause read in isolation looks fine. Read against the definitions section and two schedules, the same clause does something different.

What we do about it

Our approach is to index the document twice: once by structure, once by defined term. Findings then carry a pointer back to both, so a reviewer can confirm a conclusion without re-reading the agreement.

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.

We will revisit this once we have a larger sample. The current numbers are directional rather than settled.

governanceresearch

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