Generating redlines

A redline is the Word document with tracked changes that you send to a counterparty. Clment generates it from your review findings — only the findings you set to Use this fix or Custom instructions make it into the document.

How to generate

From the review’s Finish up tab:

1. Click Create updated contract.
2. Confirm the run. If any selected finding still needs direction (set to change the wording but with no AI-drafted fix and no custom instructions), the dialog names those findings and jumps you to them — resolve them or drop them, then generate.
3. Pick the target document if the contract has more than one (primary contract vs. attached schedule). Most contracts have just one, so this is usually a single click.
4. Wait ~20–60 seconds. Clment downloads the source DOCX, applies each selected finding as a tracked change, and uploads the result.
5. The redline appears under Documents → Redlines on the contract page. Click to download.

Which findings end up in the redline

Only findings set to change the wording are written into the document. That choice has a sensible starting position you rarely have to think about, set in this order of precedence:

1. Your explicit redline action — if you set Use this fix, Custom instructions or No change yourself, it wins.
2. Your wording — saving custom instructions selects the finding for redlining.
3. Your call — Agree includes, Disagree excludes.
4. The review strategy’s severity floor — for findings you didn’t touch, the strategy you ran the review under decides: Understand & Negotiate includes medium-severity and up, High-priority only includes high-severity and up, Strict includes everything.

In practice: decide the findings that matter (make a call, save wording, or set the redline action) and let the strategy handle the rest. A focused Understand & Negotiate or High-priority only review produces a tight redline with little manual pruning; a Strict review gives you everything and expects you to switch off what you don’t want before generating.

When a finding produces no change

Selecting a finding doesn’t guarantee a tracked change — the drafter is honest about what it can and can’t improve, and the outcome dialog accounts for every finding you selected:

• Some findings produce no edit. If the clause already achieves what the finding asks, or the point is a flag-for-awareness rather than a wording problem, the drafter skips it rather than inventing a cosmetic change. Skipped findings are listed in the outcome with a justification for each.
• One change can cover several findings. Related findings about the same clause are often resolved by a single tracked change — the outcome says which findings each change covers, so the numbers add up.
• Sometimes nothing changes. If no selected finding produced an edit, Clment tells you that directly — with the per-finding reasons — instead of producing an empty redline. It’s an outcome, not an error; typically it means the document already reflects your positions, or the remaining findings need custom instructions to act on.

What the output looks like

• A real .docx with Word-native tracked changes. Opens cleanly in any version of Word, Word Online, Google Docs (import mode), or any other editor that handles tracked changes.
• Author of the changes defaults to “[Your name] via Clment AI” — accountable to a person, transparent about the tool. You can change it in the Attribute changes to field when you generate (an MCP agent can pass a custom author too).
• Each change carries a Word comment with the rationale and, if you wrote one, your reviewer note. Your Agree / Partially / Disagree call is deliberately not written into the document — the counterparty sees the reasoning, not your internal assessment.
• The review’s REV identifier, rulebook, and author travel with the file as document metadata and in the Word comments — not as a stamped document footer. (The separate review-report export is where you get a formatted, footed write-up.)

Original document formatting (styles, headers, page numbers, embedded images) is preserved. Tracked changes appear inline; the counterparty can accept/reject each one in Word as they normally would.

What about PDFs?

Clment redlines a Word (DOCX) source, not the PDF itself. Two paths:

• If you uploaded a DOCX originally, redlines apply directly.
• If you uploaded a PDF, Clment converts it to Word first. There are two conversion styles (see Editing in Word & Docs):
  • Original Format keeps the original layout — best when the PDF is a clean, born-digital document.
  • Fresh Start rebuilds the contract as clean, flowing, natively-editable Word. Clment recommends this for scanned or fixed-layout PDFs, where keeping the original layout would leave you tracking changes inside fixed text boxes and tables that are awkward to edit. When you redline a scanned PDF, Clment offers to rebuild it with Fresh Start first, so your tracked changes land in a document that actually behaves like Word.

For the highest fidelity on a document you’re sending back to a counterparty, upload the original DOCX if you have it — the redline will use it directly.

Regenerating

You can regenerate the redline as many times as you like without losing your findings. Use cases:

• A/B redlines — generate one with conservative redline instructions, then change a few findings and generate an aggressive version. Useful for internal pre-negotiation.
• Toggling specific findings — flip a single finding between Use this fix and No change, and regenerate.
• After receiving a counter — record the counterparty’s response on each finding (in a new review), generate a fresh redline.

Each generation costs 50 credits (see Billing and credits). The previous redline isn’t deleted; the new one appears alongside under Documents → Redlines with timestamps so you can see which is which.

Best practices

• Review the redline before sending. Clment generates well-structured changes, but a senior eye on the final document is cheap insurance — especially for high-value contracts.
• Send with a cover note. A short email explaining your high-level positions (e.g. “we’ve widened the indemnity, capped your liability at 24mo of fees, and pushed back on the auto-renewal”) makes the redline easier to engage with than a raw DOCX with 17 tracked changes.
• Save your house wording in rulebook clauses. The more your rulebook’s clauses reflect your standard positions, the cleaner the generated redlines — and the less hand-editing you need.

Limitations

• A scan has to be readable. Clment reads scanned PDFs automatically and can rebuild a rough one with Fresh Start, so most scans can be redlined. But if a scan is so low-quality that almost none of the text can be recovered, there’s nothing reliable to track changes against — start from a cleaner copy or the original Word file.
• Doesn’t generate redlines for password-protected documents. Remove the password first.
• Tracks word-level changes, not character-level. A small typo fix shows as a deleted word + inserted word, not as a single-character diff. This matches Word’s own behaviour.

See also

• Reviewing contracts
• Choosing a review strategy — sets which findings are pre-included here.
• Understanding finding verdicts
• Creating a rulebook