Checkbox Unveils First Pass, Bringing AI-Powered Review to Legal Requests, Contracts and Invoices

New capabilities help legal teams get ahead of routine work before it consumes lawyer time, as Checkbox launches a rebrand putting in-house legal in command

NEW YORK, Sept. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Checkbox, the AI front door for uncontrollable legal demand used by more than 100 enterprise legal teams including SAP, PepsiCo, and BILL, today announced First Pass, a context-aware AI agent that reviews contracts, invoices, and incoming legal requests to reduce routine work and route what needs attention to the right place. The launch coincides with a new Checkbox brand centered on in-house counsel in command — a vision for giving legal teams greater control over growing demand and more time to advise the business on strategic matters.

Legal departments are drowning in high-volume contracts, invoices and requests from across the business. CLM and e-billing platforms are designed to manage work once it enters their systems, rather than determining what can be resolved or deflected before it reaches legal. The result is that highly trained lawyers remain the first pass for routine work: reviewing standard contracts, checking invoices and triaging requests that could have been resolved, deflected or routed elsewhere. That leaves less time for the work only they can do, like advising the business, managing risk and shaping consequential decisions.

First Pass is designed to move that intelligence upstream. Context aware AI now captures requests where they start, files them to matters already open instead of creating duplicates, and assigns them by guidelines defined by the legal team in plain language — such as sending the next request to whoever has the lightest workload. What used to reach legal as a raw question now arrives captured, filed and owned — and much of it is resolved before it needs a lawyer at all.

For contracts, workflows can run incoming contracts against a team's playbook or gold-standard template, returning a risk score, summary, and review before the contract reaches a lawyer. For invoices, Checkbox can check LEDES invoices for mathematical and formatting errors, then review line items against billing guidelines and return a corrected invoice and summary report. Customers using Checkbox's intake and triage layer have seen a reduction of up to 95% of NDAs requiring legal review.

"We imagined First Pass around a simple question: how much routine work can AI take off a legal team's plate?" said Evan Wong, CEO and Co-Founder of Checkbox. Legal teams shouldn't have to spend their time filtering routine work that doesn't need their judgment. First Pass is about putting Legal back in command — giving teams control over what reaches them so they can spend more time counseling the business. Our new brand reflects that same ambition."

The launch accompanies a new brand and positioning for Checkbox as the AI front door powering the most strategic legal teams. Checkbox structures how legal work enters, moves through and gets resolved across the business, giving in-house legal greater command over growing demand — so teams can counsel the business, not catch up to it. The new brand is live at checkbox.ai.

"With Checkbox, we built an operating model where legal work can enter through a single front door, route through the right workflows, and be captured and tracked. The missing piece has been intelligence on the substance of that work before it reaches legal," said Jeannine Moran, Global Head of Legal Operations and AI Technology Solutions at Hitachi Digital. "First Pass closes that gap — giving the business guidance upfront and giving legal a pre-triaged, pre-informed request rather than a cold submission."

Hitachi, in collaboration with Checkbox, won the Best Legal Transformation Project award at the Running Legal Like a Business conference last week, for reimagining legal operations to drive business impact.

The enhanced AI Agent is available today through early access, with additional capabilities planned for a broader launch in Q1 2027. Learn more at checkbox.ai.

About Checkbox

Checkbox is the AI front door for uncontrollable legal demand. It structures how legal work enters, moves through, and gets resolved across the business, capturing requests from wherever the business already works, including Slack, Teams, email, Salesforce, Jira, and web forms, and layering in no-code workflow automation for repeatable processes like NDAs, DPAs, and contract approvals. More than 100 enterprise organizations use Checkbox, including SAP, PepsiCo, and BILL.

SOURCE Checkbox