Generating redlines

Turn your review findings into a Word document with real tracked changes — ready to send to the counterparty.

Updated 17 Jun 2026

A redline is the Word document with tracked changes that you send to a counterparty. Clment generates it from your review findings — only the changes you marked Include in redline make it into the document.

How to generate

From a signed-off (or in-progress) review:

  1. Click Generate redline in the review header.
  2. 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.
  3. Wait ~20–60 seconds. Clment downloads the source DOCX, applies each “include” finding as a tracked change, and uploads the result.
  4. The redline appears under Documents → Redlines on the contract page. Click to download.

Which findings end up in the redline

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

  1. Your explicit toggle — if you flipped include on/off, it wins.
  2. A redline instruction — if you wrote replacement wording, it’s in.
  3. Your verdict — 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: Explore includes nothing, Negotiation includes medium-severity and up, High-priority only includes high-severity and up, Strict includes everything.

In practice: decide the findings that matter (set a verdict, write wording, or flip the toggle) and let the strategy handle the rest. A focused Negotiation 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.

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 is set to “Clment AI on behalf of ” so the counterparty knows where the edits came from without losing attribution.
  • A footer is stamped on the document:
    • The REV-N identifier (e.g. REV-12).
    • The playbook name used for the review.
    • The reviewer’s name and the date.

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 the DOCX source, not the PDF. Two paths:

  • If you uploaded a DOCX originally, redlines apply directly.
  • If you uploaded a PDF, Clment converts to DOCX internally for redlining, using Adobe’s high-quality PDF conversion. It’s OCR-aware and preserves most layout, though very complex formatting (multi-column layouts, footnotes, certain text-boxed callouts) can still shift. For the highest fidelity on a document you’re sending back to a counterparty, upload the original DOCX too — the redline will use it.

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’s “Include in redline” and regenerate.
  • After receiving a counter — record the counterparty’s response on each finding (in a new review), generate a fresh redline.

Each redline costs 0.5 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 playbook clauses. The more your playbook’s clauses reflect your standard positions, the cleaner the generated redlines — and the less hand-editing you need.

Limitations

  • Can’t redline scanned PDFs. If the PDF has no text layer (pure image), there’s nothing to track changes against. Re-upload as DOCX or run OCR first.
  • 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

Still have questions?

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