In the video below we show how you can analyze contracts within Emma Projects.

In this article, and the linked articles below, you'll find more detail on how contract analysis works in Emma Projects and how to set it up for your own documents.

Instead of reading every contract from start to finish to find the clauses that matter, Emma reads them for you — extracting the key terms you care about and flagging the risks defined by your checks, consistently, across every document. This turns a batch of contracts into a structured table you can scan, sort, and drill into, freeing you up to focus on judgment calls rather than page-by-page review.

Emma supports a wide range of due diligence workflows using both Emma's standard playbooks and firm-specific playbooks. Projects are best suited to standalone or lighter-weight reviews that don't need a full transactional workflow; when you need the complete deal toolkit — an Information Request List (IRL), Gap Analysis, and a Red Flag Report — run the review in an M&A data room instead (see Projects overview for when to use which).

Preliminary review

Use Emma for a quick, high-level assessment of a set of contracts before deciding whether a full due diligence exercise is warranted. Applying a standard or custom playbook, Emma identifies key legal issues, potential risks, and missing documentation, giving an initial overview of the available information — so you can decide whether to proceed, focus on identified risk areas, or expand the scope of a subsequent review.

Ask questions across one or more documents

Use Emma's AI Chat to answer questions across individual documents or your entire portfolio, for example:

Emma locates the relevant provisions and provides the supporting context, eliminating the need to manually search through multiple documents.

Identify related document updates

Emma helps identify documents that may require updating following legal, regulatory, or corporate changes. For example, after creating a new class of shares, Emma can identify which corporate documents — such as shareholders' agreements, articles of association, board resolutions, or share registers — should be amended, and where corresponding changes are likely to be required. Ask Chat directly, or add a key term or check to flag this systematically across your portfolio.

Summarise and structure information

Generate concise summaries of individual documents, or extract structured information across multiple documents. Examples include organising employment agreements by employee length of service, extracting key contractual provisions into structured tables, or producing a summary of rights and obligations across an entire contract portfolio — all using key terms and checks, or by asking Chat directly.

For comparing agreements against each other or against a reference document, see Contract comparison.

From the Emma homepage, click New Project. Give it a name (for example "Contract analysis"), and choose the output language you want Emma to use.

→ Projects overview · Language support

A playbook is what makes analysis structured rather than free-form: it defines the document types, key terms, and checks Emma should look for. If Emma has a playbook that matches your documents — for example Independent Consulting Agreements — select it. This automatically sets up the relevant key terms and risk checks for that contract type, so you don't have to configure them one by one.

You can customize the playbook after selecting it, or build your own from scratch — see Playbooks. Click Continue to create the project.

→ Project general settings

Drag and drop your contracts into Emma, or use the Upload button in the Matrix toolbar. Processing starts immediately: Emma first extracts basic information (which appears as soon as it's ready), while in parallel it works on extracting key terms and analysing the documents for risk.

→ Project integrations and files · The Folder view

Once extraction finishes, open the Key terms tab in the Matrix. Each key term is a column, each document a row. You can:

→ Key terms · Key terms tab

Switch to the Risks tab to see every risk Emma has identified across your documents. The most risky documents are shown first, and the most common risks are ordered on the left, so you can immediately see where to focus. Double-click a finding to open it in the document viewer, where you can see exactly which passage led to the finding — and click through to read Emma's reasoning for why it reached that conclusion.

You are not limited to Emma's built-in checks — you can select additional checks from Emma's library of over 100 predefined checks, or create your own from scratch.

→ Risks · Risks tab · Checks — overview · Using predefined checks · Creating a custom check

Open Chat and ask any question about your documents — for example "Who are the parties on these contracts?". If you're not happy with how a question is phrased, click the Improve button and Emma will rewrite it into a more effective prompt before running it. Emma analyses the relevant documents and answers with a summary, always with links back to where the information came from in the source document.

→ Chat · Matrix chat

To see which files have been uploaded to the project, open the Folder view from the Documents page. This shows the original folder and file structure of your uploads.