What should you look for when reviewing an employment contract?

Check the IP assignment scope, non-compete and non-solicitation terms, termination and notice provisions, confidentiality breadth, probation terms, governing law, and whether standard clauses are missing entirely. The two questions for every clause: who does this favor, and would it survive a challenge.

Why should employers review their own contract templates?

Because overreaching templates create real costs: aggressive clauses scare away strong candidates, invite legal challenges, and can be unenforceable exactly when you need them. A balanced contract protects the company better than a maximally aggressive one.

Can AI review employment contracts?

Yes, as a first pass. AI contract review can analyze documents clause by clause, score risk, flag who each clause favors, suggest fairer rewrites, and identify missing clauses. It does not replace a lawyer; it makes the lawyer conversation faster and cheaper by arriving with the issues already mapped.

How often should employment contract templates be reviewed?

At least annually, and whenever you enter a new jurisdiction or employment law changes materially. Templates drift out of date quietly, and an outdated clause is a liability you re-sign with every hire.

What are the riskiest clauses in employment contracts?

The usual suspects are overly broad IP assignment (claiming side projects), unenforceable non-competes, vague termination terms, and one-sided confidentiality. Missing clauses are just as risky: no probation terms, no data protection clause, no clear termination-for-cause definition.

Employee onboarding

Employment Contract Review: What HR Should Check Before Anyone Signs

Sakha TeamJune 4, 202611 min read

Employment contract review, from the employer's side, means auditing the documents you send every new hire (the employment agreement, NDA, IP assignment, offer letter) before they get signed again and again. Most companies wrote these templates once, often by copying someone else's, and have re-signed the same unexamined clauses with every hire since. That is how an overreaching IP clause or an unenforceable non-compete quietly becomes company-wide. This guide covers what to check, why aggressive contracts backfire, and where AI review fits. The same audit instinct applies to your written policies, covered in how to create an employee handbook.

Why review contracts you wrote yourself?

Three reasons, and none of them is paranoia.

Overreach scares talent. Senior candidates read contracts. An IP clause claiming "any and all inventions" including side projects, or a sweeping non-compete, will cost you strong hires who quietly walk away or negotiate hard, neither of which you wanted from a template.

Aggressive clauses fail when tested. Courts routinely refuse to enforce overbroad non-competes and unreasonable terms. A maximally aggressive contract often gives less real protection than a balanced one, because the balanced one survives a challenge.

Templates rot. Employment law changes, you expand to new jurisdictions, and the template written three years ago drifts out of compliance. Every hire re-signs the drift.

What should you check, clause by clause?

Clause area	What to check	Common problem
IP assignment	Scope of what is claimed	"Any and all" language capturing side projects
Non-compete	Duration, geography, scope	Too broad to be enforceable
Non-solicitation	Who and how long	Vague definitions of "solicit"
Termination	Notice, cause definition	"Cause" undefined or one-sided
Confidentiality	What counts as confidential	Everything-forever breadth
Probation	Terms and evaluation	Missing entirely
Governing law	Jurisdiction fit	Wrong or outdated jurisdiction
Missing clauses	What is not there	No data protection, no severance terms

For every clause, ask two questions: who does this favor, and would it survive a challenge. A healthy template has most clauses sitting at "balanced" rather than "maximally employer."

How do you run the review, step by step?

Gather every template a new hire signs, including the contractor versions.
Read clause by clause, not as a whole. Contracts hide problems in the aggregate; clauses reveal them individually.
Flag overreach and gaps. Overreach is anything broader than your legitimate interest requires. Gaps are the standard clauses that are simply not there.
Rewrite toward balanced and enforceable. The goal is protecting the company's real interests in language that holds up, not winning a drafting contest.
Get counsel to confirm. Arrive with the issues mapped and the rewrites drafted, and the legal engagement gets dramatically shorter and cheaper. This guide is a process, not legal advice; the final read belongs to a lawyer in your jurisdiction.

Where AI contract review fits

The bottleneck in the process above is steps 2 through 4: clause-by-clause analysis is slow, and most HR teams do not have the legal pattern-recognition to spot what a clause implies. This is exactly what AI contract review does well. It reads the full document, breaks it into clauses, scores the risk of each, flags who each clause favors, explains the issue in plain English, suggests a fairer rewrite, and lists the standard clauses your document is missing.

The honest framing: AI review is a first pass, not a lawyer replacement. Its job is to turn a 20-page contract into a mapped list of issues so the human judgment, yours and your counsel's, is spent on decisions instead of discovery.

How Sakha reviews your employment documents

Sakha includes a document review engine built for exactly this. Upload your employment agreements, NDAs, IP assignments, and offer letters, and Sakha analyzes every clause: a 0-to-100 risk score for the document, clause-level risk ratings, who each clause favors, plain-English explanations, suggested rewrites, and flagged missing clauses. It then generates a counter-draft DOCX with the changes applied, ready for your counsel to review.

No other onboarding platform does this, because contract review and onboarding are usually separate worlds. Sakha treats them as one process, which they are: the contract is the first thing a new hire experiences, before the welcome email and before day one. Reviewing it is where good onboarding actually starts. For the broader toolkit, see best employee onboarding software.

Curious how Sakha runs onboarding inside Slack? See how it works.