Once a draft contract is prepared, the crucial step of peer review and feedback begins. This process is vital for identifying potential issues, ensuring clarity, and mitigating risks before the contract is finalized and executed. It involves having other legal professionals, or even relevant business stakeholders, examine the draft from various perspectives.

Peer review acts as a quality control mechanism. It leverages collective expertise to catch errors, ambiguities, and omissions that the original drafter might have overlooked. This collaborative approach helps to ensure that the contract accurately reflects the parties' intentions and is legally sound.

Reviewers should focus on several critical aspects of the drafted contract:

Effective feedback is specific, actionable, and delivered respectfully. Reviewers should not just point out problems but also suggest solutions or alternative phrasing. When providing feedback, consider the following:

After receiving feedback, the original drafter must carefully consider each comment. It's important to understand the reviewer's perspective and decide how to incorporate the suggestions. This often involves a dialogue between the drafter and the reviewer to ensure mutual understanding. The contract is then revised based on the agreed-upon changes, and the process may repeat if significant revisions are made or if further review is deemed necessary.

Various tools can facilitate the peer review process. 'Track Changes' features in word processing software are essential for showing proposed edits. Collaboration platforms and document management systems can streamline the sharing and commenting process. For complex contracts, creating a 'redline' document that clearly shows all changes from a previous version is standard practice.