Governing law detection
LiveReads the governing-law clause before deciding which law a contract is analysed under — and treats "unknown" as an answer.
- ✓Deterministic governing-law clause matching across the whole document, not a leading extract
- ✓Sub-national resolution where contract law is sub-national — Delaware, New York, California, Ontario
- ✓A model's classification is one signal and never the decider
- ✓Unknown is a real answer: general commercial-contract treatment, never a fallback to another country's law
What it is.
Analysing a contract under the wrong law produces advice that is confident and wrong. So before anything else runs, LexVio reads the whole document for a governing-law clause and matches it deterministically — "governed by English law", "the laws of the State of Delaware", "the laws of Singapore". Sub-national is respected wherever contract law is sub-national: Delaware, New York and California are three different answers, and so are Ontario and Quebec.
The order is an explicit choice first, then the clause, then a model's classification, then your organisation's default. A model never outranks a clause that states the answer in words. When nothing settles it the jurisdiction is unknown, and unknown is a decision rather than a gap — the contract is analysed as a general commercial contract instead of being quietly filed under some other country's law. Every decision is recorded with the signals behind it, including the model's suggestion on the occasions the clause overruled it.
Three steps.
End to end.
Detection runs inside the analysis pass. Nothing to configure, and no per-document setting to forget.
A deterministic pass over the full text, not an extract. A governing-law clause on page 30 outranks a classifier that read the first few pages.
The decision, its confidence and the signals behind it are stored against the contract. Override it and the override is stored too — as the strongest signal there is.
What you get.
- ✓Deterministic governing-law clause matching across the whole document, not a leading extract
- ✓Sub-national resolution where contract law is sub-national — Delaware, New York, California, Ontario
- ✓A model's classification is one signal and never the decider
- ✓Unknown is a real answer: general commercial-contract treatment, never a fallback to another country's law
- ✓Every decision recorded with its signals, including the ones that were overruled
- ✓Human override, recorded alongside the automatic decision
Quick answers.
Your organisation's default applies if you have set one; otherwise the jurisdiction stays unknown and the contract is analysed as a general commercial contract. It is never assigned to a jurisdiction on a guess.
Only where the deterministic signals are absent or disagree, and even then its answer ranks below a governing-law clause. A clause that names the law in words does not need a model to read it.
More in Review & Risk Analysis.
Three-tier extraction cascade so PDF, DOCX, and scanned bilingual contracts all work.
Red, amber, or green for every clause, with an explanation and confidence score.
One number, 0-100, summarising your contract's overall risk position.
Upload a ZIP of contracts and ask one question across all of them.