Playbooks let you encode your negotiation positions once and apply them to every agreement you review. This article covers building and maintaining a playbook. For rule-writing technique, see Writing & Refining Playbook Rules — Best Practices.
Overview
In this article you will learn how to:
Find and manage playbooks from the Playbooks entry in the left navigation
Generate a playbook with AI from your own templates or redlined agreements
Understand the structure of a rule — a Starting Position plus optional fallback positions
Run a playbook against a document and work through the results
Validate a new playbook before you rely on it
Maintain a playbook over time
Where Playbooks Live
Playbooks have their own entry in the left navigation. You can build, edit and review a playbook there without opening a document first.
You can also work with playbooks from inside a document: open the document and click the Playbooks icon in the middle menu bar — the book icon, just under the robot icon — to open the Playbooks panel.
Anyone with access to your Aline workspace can see the playbooks you build; they are shared, not personal.
Step 1: Understand How a Rule Is Built
A rule is a title plus an ordered list of positions:
The top entry is the Starting Position — what you ask for first.
Every entry below it is a fallback position — what you will accept if the starting position is rejected.
Fallback positions are optional. If you generate a playbook from a template you are happy with, you will usually get starting positions only. Fallbacks are most useful when you have real negotiation history to draw on.
💡 When a rule needs review and you accept one of its positions, the sibling positions are greyed out so you cannot also accept them.
Step 2: Generate a Playbook with AI
Aline can build a playbook from documents you already have — a baseline template, or a set of redlined agreements that show the positions your team has actually accepted. There are two entry points:
From Playbooks (left navigation):
Open Playbooks and click the + option.
Choose Create playbook with AI.
Attach the files you want the playbook built from.
From a document:
Open the document and open the Playbooks panel in the editor.
Click Generate a playbook.
Add any additional context in the chat before generating.
Aline reads the attached files, checks whether a playbook already exists, and then asks you:
Which party you represent — an entity name ("Aline, Inc.") or a role ("Company", "Customer", "Vendor")
How balanced or aggressive you want the positions to be
Any additional instructions — for example, "do not generate any rules for assignment provisions"
You then get a draft plan to review and refine in chat before you approve it. Generation runs incrementally, and every rule and position is editable afterwards.
📌 Because the AI reads your redlined deals rather than a generic library, the playbook reflects positions your team has genuinely accepted. Pointing it at several redlined versions of the same agreement type produces better fallbacks than pointing it at one clean template.
Step 3: Run the Playbook on a Document
Open the document you want reviewed.
Open the Playbooks panel and select the playbook.
Click Run at the top right of the playbook.
Run the whole playbook rather than a single category — clicking Run evaluates every rule at once. A playbook you have not run yet shows as Not run; that only means it has not been executed, not that it failed to find anything.
Aline evaluates all positions in each rule and shows which rules passed and which need review, with its reasoning and a citation back to the source text.
Step 4: Work Through the Results
Use the filters at the top of the results to separate passing rules from rules that need review.
Use Previous and Next to move between findings — the document scrolls to the relevant location automatically.
Click a finding to see the reasoning and the cited clause.
Accept or reject each suggested addition or redline. Accepting writes the change straight into the document.
⚠️ A rule fires whether or not the document already addresses it. If you have a rule about a topic the agreement is silent on, the playbook will propose adding a provision for it. That is intended behaviour — check the additions as carefully as the redlines.
⚠️ Accepting or rejecting a redline does not teach the playbook anything. The playbook only changes when you edit its rules. If a rule keeps flagging something you do not care about, edit or delete the rule.
Step 5: Edit Rules from a Run
You can jump straight from a finding to the rule behind it:
Click the three dots next to the rule or category title in the results.
Click Edit — you are taken to that rule in Playbooks.
Use the pencil icon to edit the Starting Position, or add a fallback position below it.
⚠️ Editing a rule this way changes it for the whole playbook, not just the document you are looking at. That is usually what you want, but it does mean the change applies to every future run.
Step 6: Validate Before You Rely on It
Generating a playbook is only half the job. Before you put it into production:
Read every generated rule and edit anything that does not match how you actually negotiate.
Run the playbook once against a third party's paper — not your own template — so you can see what it flags on a document it has never seen.
Work in Suggesting Mode so redlines appear as tracked changes. Avoid Editing Mode, which applies changes in final form.
Adjust the rules that over-flagged or under-flagged, then run again.
File Formats
To have the playbook apply redlines, the document must be a Word (.docx) file. A PDF can still be analysed — you will get flags, reasoning and citations — but Aline cannot write tracked changes into a PDF. Convert the PDF to Word first. See File Format Requirements & PDF-to-Word Conversion.
💡 Best Practices
Generate from redlined agreements, not just a clean template, when you want realistic fallback positions.
Edit every AI-generated rule before the first production run — treat generation as a first draft.
Validate against a third party's paper before rolling the playbook out to the team.
Keep one concept per rule; merge duplicate or overlapping rules rather than stacking them.
Remember that runs consume tokens — see Understanding Token Usage in Aline.
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