Slack and Teams triage: thirty-second summaries, now in beta

Triage for Slack and Microsoft Teams is available in beta from today for tenants on Review 4.2. These are the release notes: what it does, what changed under the surface to make it possible, what to watch for, and the limitations we know about.

What it does

A user in a channel where the ZAAN app has been added uploads a contract, or shares one from the DMS, and mentions the app. About thirty seconds later, in a thread under the file, the app returns a triage card:

• Document type, as classified: NDA, MSA, SPA, DPA, licence, order form, or “other” with a short description.
• Parties, as named in the document, with the firm’s client highlighted where the matter can be matched.
• Governing law and jurisdiction, with a flag if they disagree with each other or with the firm’s default for that counterparty.
• The three highest-severity findings against the tenant’s playbook, each with a one-line description and a severity tier. High findings are always shown; where fewer than three findings exist, the card says so.
• A link to open the full Review in Word.

That is the whole card. It does not propose redlines in the channel, does not quote the clause text beyond what is needed to identify the finding, and does not attempt to answer follow-up questions in the thread. Triage is for deciding who should look at a document and how urgently, not for reviewing it.

What changed

Three pieces of engineering made this possible, and each has consequences worth knowing about.

First, a short-form output mode for the Review engine. Review normally produces a complete findings set with citations and redlines. For triage it runs the same playbook pass but stops after classification, party extraction, governing-law analysis and severity ranking. Redline generation is skipped. This is why the card arrives in around thirty seconds for a typical forty-page agreement rather than the two to four minutes a full review takes. The findings on the card are identical to the top three a full Review would produce; nothing is approximated.

Second, an ephemeral processing path. Files shared in chat are fetched from the platform’s file store, processed in the tenant’s region, and discarded. The file is never written to a ZAAN store. The card itself is posted back to the channel and lives there under the platform’s own retention policy, which the firm controls. Zero retention applies to the document; the card is the firm’s data in the firm’s chat tool.

Third, matter matching from party names. Where the parties on the document can be matched to a client in the firm’s matter database, the card shows the match and the link opens Review in that matter. Where they cannot, the link opens Review unassigned and the reviewer chooses. Matching is conservative; a near-match is shown as a suggestion, not applied.

Why

Across active accounts, a substantial share of contracts reach legal through chat: a salesperson drops a counterparty’s paper into a channel and asks whether it is fine. The question legal actually needs answered in that moment is not “is it fine” but “what is this, how bad is it and who should read it”. That is a triage question, and answering it in the channel where it was asked saves a round-trip that often takes a day.

We also wanted to reduce the number of documents that are reviewed in full when they did not need to be. A standard-form NDA on the firm’s own paper with no High findings can be routed to a junior or signed off directly. Triage makes that visible before anyone opens Word.

What to watch for

Permissions. The app only reads files in channels where an administrator has added it, and only when mentioned. It does not read message history, and it does not read files that are not explicitly directed to it. Administrators should review which channels the app is added to; we recommend a small number of dedicated channels rather than firm-wide availability during the beta.

Shared and external channels. In Slack Connect channels and Teams channels shared with external organisations, the app is disabled by default, because a triage card posted into a shared channel is visible to the counterparty. Administrators can enable it per channel and will be warned when doing so.

Playbook selection. The app uses the tenant’s default playbook unless the channel is mapped to a specific one. Firms with per-practice-area playbooks should map their channels before enabling triage, or the card will apply the wrong tiers.

Stale cards. The card reflects the document at the moment it was shared. If the file is replaced or edited in the platform, the card is not updated. Mention the app again to re-run.

Known limitations

Scanned documents are processed through OCR and the card indicates when this happened; accuracy on party names and governing law is lower for poor scans. Documents over 150 pages are queued rather than processed immediately, and the card will say so. Multi-document bundles, such as an MSA with six schedules in one PDF, are triaged as one document and the type will often be reported as “other”. Triage is English-only in this beta; documents in other languages return a card stating the detected language and a link to full Review, which handles all 38. And the Teams app is not yet available in government cloud tenants.

To enable the beta, administrators use the integrations page in the admin console. Enabling requires acknowledging the permissions summary and mapping at least one channel to a playbook. The beta is expected to run through the end of the year; we will publish what we learn from it before deciding on general availability.

If you enable it, start with one channel and the people who already answer the “is this fine” question. They will tell you quickly whether the card answers it.