It’s the indemnity clause in a contract that comes over as one-sided, where you know—from having negotiated a similar term with similar customers dozens of times—where the balance of risk is likely to land. This recognition lets you decide whether to do the dance of a back and forth where you push hard, only to meet in the middle later, or whether to skip straight to where you know the clause is likely to land.

Or it’s bigger picture: your business colleagues assure you the counterparty is as excited as they are about a new deal, but the counterparty’s legal team is exceedingly slow . . . and you’re the first to realize that the counterparty’s business team is not actually that motivated, because you’ve seen it a dozen times before.

And also, if you look really closely, both of those calls could go the other way — the indemnity clause where the balance of risk actually shifted, the counterparty that really was that excited despite the slow legal team.

Pattern recognition is invaluable. It's also a shortcut. And shortcuts sometimes backfire. Especially if you don’t use them intentionally.

That’s what this issue is about. Plus how you can make sure it doesn’t happen to you.

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You have so much to do that you could easily fill a few more days each week with valuable work. So you're constantly hunting for the highest-value tasks. I've written about this before: What if the Key to Avoiding Being a Bottleneck Is Doing Less?

You also look for efficiency everywhere you can find it. If you can make a decision, review a clause, or draft preferred language once and reuse it, you do. That's why playbooks, AI, and templates are essential for in-house legal teams.

Pattern recognition is another way to move faster. It works because the same facts, in similar scenarios, tend to lead to similar outcomes. Which is exactly why it's easy to lean on it a little too much.

Here are the traps to look out for, so you don’t rely too much on pattern recognition.