CASUS is a Swiss legal AI platform that analyses licence agreements for IP clauses, prioritises risks by severity, and makes improvement suggestions actionable directly in Microsoft Word. Data is hosted exclusively in Switzerland or the EU, with no transfer to the US. Zero Data Retention and no Human Review are active by default – relevant for confidential technology and pharmaceutical licences.
Why IP clauses in licence agreements are so prone to gaps
Licence agreements are among the most complex contracts in commercial practice. The difficulty is not that individual clauses are hard to understand. It is that many IP-relevant provisions are distributed across the full contract text and only produce their effect when read together. An ownership clause in section 4, an improvement provision in section 12, and a sublicensing restriction in section 18 are logically linked – but easy to miss when reviewed in isolation.
For in-house teams at technology and pharmaceutical companies, this is a real daily challenge. Contracts frequently arrive for review at short notice, time pressure is high, and the variety of clause configurations is wide. Errors in IP clauses are also particularly consequential: incorrect ownership rules for improvements, or poorly drafted back-licences, can result in the loss of strategically important intellectual property rights.
What makes a licence agreement distinctive from an IP perspective?
A licence agreement grants the right to use another party's intellectual property – typically a patent, software, trade mark, know-how, or a combination. The critical IP clauses address three questions: what exactly is being licensed, under what conditions may it be used, and who owns improvements and further developments?
Added to this are provisions on sublicensing, confidentiality, termination and its IP consequences (return of materials, deletion obligations, post-termination use rights), warranties regarding the protected rights, and – for software – source code escrow and deposit mechanisms.
In software IP licences specifically, the boundary between the licensed right and the accompanying know-how transfer is often poorly defined, which leads to significant interpretive effort when disputes arise.
How AI changes the review of IP clauses
AI tools now make it possible to review a licence agreement systematically for these clauses without manually calling up each section individually. The practical difference is less about speed and more about completeness: a structured AI review also identifies regulatory gaps – topics that are simply absent from the contract.
CASUS offers two main approaches for this. The Risk & Quality Review analyses the licence agreement from each party's perspective: which clauses are disadvantageous for the client's side, which are incomplete, and which are clearly drafted in favour of the counterparty? Each finding is prioritised by severity (low / medium / high) and paired with concrete drafting suggestions that can be applied directly in Word.
The Benchmark workflow takes a different route: it checks the document against a reference standard – either an internal playbook or established best practices for licence agreements. The result shows which standard clauses are missing, which are present but incomplete, and where deviations from the standard exist. A percentage score reflects overall conformity.
For teams that want to systematically review a licence portfolio, the AI Data Room enables the parallel analysis of dozens or hundreds of licence agreements, with results presented in a structured table – organised by defined fields such as IP ownership, sublicensing restrictions, or post-termination consequences.
Typical IP clause gaps that AI surfaces
Common regulatory gaps in licence agreements that a structured AI review identifies:
IP ownership for improvements not defined. The Benchmark workflow flags this explicitly as a missing topic area. In practice, this is one of the most frequent points of dispute: who owns improvements made by the licensee?
Sublicensing without restrictions. Without a clear rule on whether and under what conditions further sublicensing is permitted, unintended chains of use can develop.
No defined procedure for third-party IP infringement. Who must bring an action? Who bears the costs? Who benefits from a successful outcome? These questions remain open in many licence agreements.
Back-licences after contract termination not addressed. The licensee develops over years on the basis of licensed IP – what happens to those own developments when the contract ends?
Confidentiality without deletion obligation. Know-how transferred under the licence should be returned or destroyed upon termination. Without this rule, confidentiality remains effectively unsecured.
Teams looking to try this in practice: a free account is available at app.getcasus.com/signup. The platform is ready to use immediately – through the web app without any installation, or as a Word add-in within the usual working environment.
AI-generated content and copyright – a specific IP question
Licence agreements that are intended to cover AI-generated output raise a distinct legal question: can purely AI-generated content be protected by copyright and therefore licensed at all?
The answer under German and Swiss law is clear: no. Copyright protection requires a natural person as the author and a personal intellectual creative contribution. Purely AI-generated content does not meet these requirements and is therefore in the public domain. Classical licence agreements built on copyright law do not apply to this type of content.
Copyright becomes relevant only where a human contributed sufficiently to the creation – for example through substantial post-editing or detailed creative direction that is recognisable in the output. For hybrid works, the principle of separability applies: the human-created elements remain protected, while the purely AI-generated parts are not.
Licence agreements intended to cover AI output therefore require new contractual structures beyond classical copyright licensing: contractual usage rights without a copyright foundation, combined with know-how protection and confidentiality arrangements.
The legal situation for AI contracts themselves: what to watch when purchasing AI
Anyone who purchases AI services enters into a licence or usage agreement of their own – and that agreement has its own IP complications. Many standard contracts from large AI providers are tailored to US law and address EU or Swiss requirements only superficially.
The EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) entered into force on 1 August 2024. General application begins from 2 August 2026, while specific provisions such as prohibited practices (Art. 5) have applied since 2 February 2025. The AI Act does not apply directly to Swiss companies, but it affects every organisation that deploys or distributes AI systems in the EU market.
In AI usage contracts, the following clauses deserve particular attention from an IP perspective: who owns the output, may the provider use inputs for training, what IP indemnification exists for third-party claims arising from training data rights, and how is liability for incorrect or rights-infringing AI outputs allocated?
With the AI Chat, specific questions like these can be put directly to the document. Answers are linked to the relevant passages – enabling targeted navigation without manually searching through the contract.
Practical implications for law firms and in-house teams
Law firms that regularly review licence agreements for technology or pharmaceutical clients face the task of establishing a consistent review process that works even under time pressure. An AI-assisted review does not replace legal judgement, but it substantially reduces the time to a first complete risk overview.
For in-house teams at larger organisations, the data protection dimension is often decisive: anyone uploading confidential licence agreements containing sensitive know-how to an AI system needs to know where the data resides and whether it is used for model training. CASUS hosts exclusively in Switzerland and the EU, transfers no data to the US, and does not use submitted documents for model training – which makes the platform suitable for this scenario. Further information on the security architecture and data residency is available on the security page.
The Proofread module completes the review process at the final stage: it checks cross-references, definitions, and annexes for formal consistency – a step that is particularly error-prone in licence agreements with many internal references, such as those to patent lists as attachments.
FAQ
What can AI concretely do when reviewing a licence agreement?
AI can analyse licence agreements for IP clauses in a structured way, identify gaps and deviations from standard practice, prioritise risks by severity, and produce concrete drafting suggestions. The legal assessment and negotiation strategy remain the responsibility of the responsible lawyer.
Can purely AI-generated content be protected by copyright?
No. Under German and Swiss law, copyright protection requires a natural person as author. Purely AI-generated output without a sufficient human creative contribution is in the public domain and cannot be licensed under classical copyright law.
Which IP clauses are most often missing from licence agreements?
Frequently absent or inadequately addressed areas include: ownership of improvements, sublicensing restrictions, procedures for third-party IP infringement, back-licences after termination, and deletion obligations for transferred know-how.
How does CASUS protect confidential licence agreement data?
CASUS hosts exclusively in Switzerland and the EU, transfers no data to the US, applies Zero Data Retention by default, and does not offer Human Review. Documents are not used for model training.
What is the difference between the Risk Review and the Benchmark for licence agreements?
The Risk Review analyses the contract from each party's perspective and identifies disadvantageous or imbalanced clauses. The Benchmark checks the document against a reference standard and shows which standard clauses are missing or deviate – the two approaches are complementary, not interchangeable.
How does the AI Data Room help with a licence portfolio?
The AI Data Room enables the parallel analysis of many licence agreements. Defined extraction fields – for example IP ownership, sublicensing, post-termination consequences – produce a tabular overview that can be used directly for due diligence or compliance purposes.
Does the EU AI Act apply to Swiss companies?
The EU AI Act does not apply directly to Swiss companies, but it affects every organisation that deploys or distributes AI systems in the EU market. For the procurement of AI services from EU-regulated providers, the AI Act's compliance requirements are indirectly relevant.
Can CASUS also review English-language licence agreements?
Yes. CASUS works independently of language – English-language licence agreements can be analysed in the same way as German-language documents.
Getting started with AI-assisted licence agreement review
Licence agreements are too specific for a generic contract check to be sufficient. Anyone looking to review IP clauses systematically and with attention to their own negotiating position needs a tool that combines party-aware analysis, completeness checks, and drafting support.
CASUS, a Swiss legal AI platform, offers exactly that – with the Risk Review for party-aware risk analysis, the Benchmark for comparison against playbooks, and the AI Data Room for portfolio-level reviews. All within an environment that meets Swiss data protection requirements. Getting started is free at app.getcasus.com/signup.
