About Concordance

What it is, and how it actually works — including what it deliberately doesn't use.

Concordance is a document governance and negotiation tool for two or more parties working through a shared agreement — a merger, a partnership, a constitution amendment, anything that needs every side's sign-off before it's final. Everyone reads the same documents with a plain-language explanation alongside the operative wording, proposes changes, raises concerns with the other side, and tracks what's been agreed — all without either side needing to trust a black box for what the documents actually say.

No AI in the live product. Unlike some document tools, Concordance's plain-language summaries aren't generated live by a model — they're written ahead of time by whoever's running the hub (with an optional, entirely separate offline drafting aid available to help write them, never used automatically and never touching a live negotiation). What every participant reads is fixed, reviewable text, not something regenerated per visit. That's a deliberate design choice: in a negotiation where the exact wording matters, "the same explanation every time, written by a person" is more trustworthy than "whatever a model produces this time."

How the engine actually works

Plain-language summaries — curated, not generated

Each clause's "in plain terms" explanation is written and reviewed by an administrator when the hub is set up, not produced on the fly. What you read is the same for every participant, every time, and can be checked against the real wording directly above it.

Cross-referencing — keyword matching, not AI

When a clause is linked to related provisions elsewhere in the agreement (or flagged as "needs confirming" after a change), that's a scoring algorithm comparing shared meaningful words across clauses — the same kind of matching Plainly uses for its own document library, just applied across one negotiation's documents instead of a personal library. No model involved.

The negotiation workflow

Suggestions and concerns move through a structured process: raised internally first, then sent to the other side's administrator, who can acknowledge, propose different wording, or refer it to leadership — the raising side confirms before anything becomes a real, committed change to the documents. Nothing is written to the master documents automatically at any step.

Access & privacy, in plain terms

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