Tabular review
Tabular review turns a stack of documents into a spreadsheet. You define columns once (key dates, governing law, named parties, risk indicators, or whatever else matters), Parachute extracts the answer from each document into a cell, and the whole grid fills out in parallel. When the grid doesn’t answer your question, you can chat with the documents directly.
It works for any kind of document - contracts, policies, employment agreements, due-diligence reports, board minutes, witness statements - anything where you’d otherwise be opening files one by one looking for the same handful of fields.
A tabular review has three parts:
- Documents as rows. Each row is one document you want to analyse.
- Columns as questions. Each column is an extraction prompt, like “What is the effective date?” or “Who are the named parties?”.
- Cells as answers. Parachute runs each column’s prompt against each document and writes the answer (plus a reasoning trail and citation) into the cell.
Each cell also carries a flag so you can scan the grid for issues at a glance:
- Green - clearly addressed, standard or favourable
- Grey - addressed but neutral, or the question doesn’t apply
- Yellow - addressed but unusual or borderline
- Red - a clear risk or exception that needs attention
To create a review:
- Navigate to Tabular review in the sidebar
- Click New review
- Enter a title
- Optionally pick a matter the review belongs to
- Optionally start from a template - pre-built column packs like “Standard contract review” save you typing out the common columns by hand
The matter is optional. If you do attach one, any documents you later upload into the review can also be linked to that matter automatically.
Open the review and click Add documents. The dialog has two tabs:
Pick documents that already exist in your organisation. This is the fastest path if you’ve already uploaded the files somewhere else in Parachute (a chat thread, a matter, a previous review).
Drag-drop or browse for new files. PDFs, Word documents, and the other supported file types all work. You can optionally pick a matter from the dropdown on this tab - the uploaded documents will be linked to that matter as well as to the review.
If the review has a matter already, that matter is pre-selected for you. If the review doesn’t have a matter yet and you pick one here, the review inherits it.
To add a column, click Add column above the grid. Each column needs:
- Name - the column header, e.g. “Term length”
- Format - how the answer should be shaped
- Prompt - the question Parachute asks the document
The format constrains the shape of the answer so the column renders cleanly:
- Text - free-form prose, good for summaries
- Bulleted list - one item per bullet, for lists of items, parties, or carve-outs
- Number / Percentage - a single numeric value
- Monetary amount / Currency - a dollar figure or currency code
- Yes / No - a binary answer, renders as a Yes/No pill
- Date - a single date or date range
- Tag - one tag from a fixed list you define (e.g. “Low”, “Medium”, “High”)
If you’re not sure how to phrase the prompt, click Suggest prompt. Parachute writes one for you from the column’s title and format. You can edit the suggestion before saving.
Once you have documents and columns, click Run all. Parachute processes the documents in parallel and streams answers into the grid as they complete. Cell states you’ll see:
- Pending - waiting to start
- Generating - the model is working on this cell right now (small animated dots)
- Done - finished, summary shown with the flag colour as a left border
- Error - something went wrong, with a Retry button on the cell
You can stop a run at any time, regenerate a single cell, or re-run only a specific column.
Click any cell to open its detail panel. You’ll see:
- The full summary (truncated in the grid view)
- The reasoning Parachute used to arrive at the answer
- Citations - clickable pills like p.4 that open a preview of the source document with the cited quote highlighted
Use the citations to verify any answer that matters. If you disagree with the result, click Regenerate on the cell.
Click Chat to open a chat panel alongside the grid. The chat is grounded in two layers of context:
- The grid - the chat model has access to every cell’s summary, so it can answer comparative questions like “Which documents have a termination clause?” or “Summarise the key dates across these files” without re-reading anything.
- The documents themselves - if you ask something the columns don’t cover, the chat searches the full text of the underlying documents and answers from there. For example, with employment agreements and no holiday column, you can still ask “How many days of annual leave do these employees get?” and the chat will pull the answer straight from the documents.
The chat cites its sources, so you can click through to see the exact passage it used.
If a tabular review is attached to a matter, the matter’s full context (other threads, linked documents) is available to the AI when you chat. The reverse is also true: documents uploaded inside a review with a matter set will appear on the matter detail page.
You can change a review’s matter at any time from the review header.
If a review is finished, archive it from the review header. Archived reviews disappear from the main list but stay searchable. Archiving doesn’t delete the underlying documents - they remain accessible from wherever else they’re attached.
- Matters - link reviews to a matter so the AI has full case context
- Document review - run a deep, single-document analysis when one file needs close inspection
- Knowledge base - feed firm-specific precedents into Parachute so reviews are evaluated against your standards
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