Projects lets you analyse and compare contracts outside the context of an M&A data room. Where a data room is built around a specific deal, a Project is a flexible workspace for any contract review task — regardless of whether a transaction is involved.
In this video we give a quick overview on what Projects are about.
What can you use Projects for?
Projects are designed for situations where you need to review, benchmark, or extract insights from a set of contracts without tying that work to an active deal.
Identifying risks in a contract portfolio
Upload a batch of similar contracts — such as a company's employment agreements, supplier agreements, or loan facilities — and run checks across all of them at once. Emma surfaces risks and missing clauses consistently, so you can spot patterns that a manual read-through would miss.
Examples:
Reviewing employment agreements for non-compete clauses, garden leave provisions, or severance terms that create unexpected exposure
Analysing commercial contracts to flag uncapped liability, automatic renewal clauses, or unusual termination rights
Checking lease agreements for break rights, rent review mechanisms, or landlord consent requirements that could affect a transaction or refinancing
Comparing contracts side by side
When you have multiple versions of the same contract type — across counterparties, jurisdictions, or time periods — Projects lets you compare them on a structured set of criteria rather than reading each one in full.
Examples:
Comparing Share Purchase Agreements (SPAs) from different deals to benchmark representations & warranties, indemnity caps, or earn-out mechanics
Mapping differences across distribution or reseller agreements to understand which counterparties have received more favourable terms
Reviewing a portfolio of loan agreements to identify which ones contain cross-default clauses or financial covenant variations
Standalone contract review engagements
Not every legal review is part of a deal. Projects cover standalone advisory work such as:
Conducting a contract health check for a client ahead of a refinancing or restructuring
Reviewing a company's standard form contracts to flag clauses that are out of step with current market practice
Performing a post-merger integration review to compare the acquired company's contracts against the buyer's standard templates
Getting started: step-by-step
1. Create a project
Click New project from the Emma homepage or from the projects list in the sidebar. A new project is created immediately — you can rename it afterward from the Matrix header.
2. Add your documents
Inside your project, open the Matrix. You can add documents directly from there:
Drag and drop files onto the Matrix, or
Click the Upload button in the Matrix toolbar to browse and select files
Emma starts processing documents as soon as they are uploaded — classification and AI extraction happen in the background.
3. Apply a playbook
A playbook defines the document types and key terms Emma uses to organise and extract data from your contracts. Applying one saves you from setting everything up manually.
In the Matrix, click the playbook button next to the project name. Pick a Projects type playbook from your organization's library, then click Save on the right side of the toolbar to confirm.
Emma will categorise your documents and set up key terms automatically. You can watch the progress in the dialog — or close it and let it run in the background.
If you want to build your own playbook from scratch, go to Settings > Organization settings > Playbooks.
4. Add or select checks
Checks are questions Emma evaluates against every relevant document to surface risks — for example, "Does this contract contain a non-compete clause?" or "Is there an uncapped liability provision?"
In the Matrix, select a document type in the sidebar and click the checks button in the toolbar. From there you can:
Click Add predefined checks to pick from Emma's built-in library grouped by topic (employment, IP, finance, etc.)
Click Add check to write a fully custom question with your own risk level definitions
Each check you add becomes a column in the Risks tab of the Matrix, showing a risk level (High / Medium / Low / No risk) per document.
5. Review and manage key terms
Key terms are specific data points Emma extracts from each document — things like governing law, notice periods, contract value, or effective date. They appear as columns in the Key terms tab of the Matrix.
If you applied a playbook, key terms are already set up. To add more, open the Matrix, select a document type in the sidebar, and go to the Key terms tab. Click the + icon at the right end of the column headers to add a term, or click the settings icon to manage existing ones. You can also click Generate key terms (the sparkle icon) and Emma will suggest additional relevant terms based on your documents.
To compare key terms across documents — for example to spot which contract has the longest notice period — select a reference document and use the Compare view.
6. Ask questions with Chat
Emma's AI chat lets you ask free-form questions across all the documents in your project. Open Chat from the main sidebar and type your question — for example:
"Which contracts have a termination-for-convenience clause?"
"What is the highest liability cap across all agreements?"
"Summarise the key obligations in the employment contracts"
Answers include inline citations that link directly to the relevant passage in the source document.
You can also chat from within the Matrix — the chat bar at the bottom of any document type table lets you ask questions scoped to just those documents.
→ Chat · Matrix chat
Continue learning
The articles below each include a video walkthrough — a good starting point to explore the full functionality of Emma Projects:
Document viewer overview — reading documents and reviewing AI findings inline
Matrix overview and Info tab — the structured view of summaries and risks by document
Checks — overview — how to define and run risk checks across documents
Playbooks — reuse your check configurations across Projects and data rooms
Chat — ask questions directly about the documents in your workspace
If you need additional help on Projects or you encounter any other problem, don't hesitate to reach out to us through the chat bubble in the bottom right or to contact [email protected]