Introducing the Document Crunch Microsoft Word Add-In

For any sizable construction project, executives, contract specialists, and business development teams will negotiate back and forth with the project owner over contract terms. From questions of how much retainage to set aside all the way to how many weather days the team gets, the nitty gritty details are crucial to get right and may ultimately determine the profitability of the project.  

But these contracts are not simple, and often difficult to understand – it’s easy to get lost when you’re working with hundreds of pages of legalese. How do stakeholders work together throughout the negotiation and redlining process to ensure everyone is on the same page?  

The new Document Crunch integration with Microsoft Word delivers our AI-driven contract insights directly inside of contract teams’ negotiation workflow, ensuring teams can redline with confidence without missing any key details.  

The Problem: Negotiating complicated contracts  

Teams needing to make changes to contract verbiage prior to starting a project typically send long documents (100+ pages) back and forth and often don’t know exactly where the changes are being made unless they read through the entire document.  

Not only is this a huge time drain – it’s difficult. How are you going to ensure you’re accurately finding the contract provisions important to your firm on every read-through? Do you know how they’ve changed – or even what each provision means? 

Teams are left with few choices other than to come up with language that their firm will accept and scan the document for key phrases or words and either copy and pasting this ‘tried and true’ language from another file or trying to redline in their version to make the fewest available changes to the document. While it may service the need for negotiation, it’s error prone and creates heavily siloed ‘tribal knowledge’ that only a few reviewers may have – opening teams up to potential issues when trying to take on new business. 

Historically, teams have been using Document Crunch’s collaboration workflows to comment, annotate, and highlight different parts of the contract – and while this was a game changer for many teams, it still required someone to take these changes from Document Crunch and manually insert them into the document. A step that added extra time and effort to the process. 

But what if it were easier? 

The Solution: Document Crunch Embedded Insights in Microsoft Word 

Our Microsoft Word integration delivers the same insights our users have benefitted from for years and puts it right into their document, highlighting places where each provision is mentioned and leading users right to each location in the document. Check it out: 

Being embedded within Word, our integration gives users the ability to instantly locate complicated and detail-heavy provisions, saving time when going through the document and ensuring contract reviewers don’t miss a beat when reviewing a file. Users have reported saving hours per negotiation by simply having Document Crunch right within their typical workflow for redlining. 

Use Mutually-Agreed Upon Language 

But it doesn’t stop there – each provision comes complete with sample language customized to what your organization will accept for each situation. No more alt-tabbing back and forth to other documents with pre-prepared language, you can have your sample example and instructions at the tip of your fingers within the document. 

Upskill Your Team 

Many construction contracts can seem tricky or difficult to understand at first glance – especially if the reviewer doesn’t have legal experience. Our integration with Word embeds contract provision insights for each provision, breaking down in plain language what that section means, how it may apply to you, and why you should care about that specific part 

Crunch Every Version 

Because we’re located directly within your workflow, users can take advantage of all that Microsoft Word has to offer while also seeing and understanding contract insights – just check out how someone can go from comparing contracts to redlining in seconds: 

Bringing Contract Insights to Everyone 

It is our sincere hope that this integration brings the power of Document Crunch to a new audience of users that spend their day heads-down in the negotiation of construction contracts. And while the integration is new, our users have already had great things to say about it. Just check out what Kyle Reynolds, Risk Manager at Andres Construction had to say: 

“The ability to quickly identify contract risks right within Microsoft Word, our preferred platform for contract redlining, takes Document Crunch to the next level for us.” 

If you’d like to level up your contract redlining game with AI-powered insights from Document Crunch, we’d love to help. Get in touch with us here!