Legal departments are more focused than ever on finding ways to efficiently manage their contracts. At scale, contract generation and formation are the easy part. Mature forms and established workflows underpin a playbooked process augmented with automation (document assembly, escalation triggers, e-signatures). Often, the real challenge is organizing executed contracts at scale and extracting actionable information.
For example, it is labor-intensive to identify all contracts with pending expiration dates if all you have is a file folder containing nothing but scanned contracts. These files are “unstructured.” Someone would have to open and read each contract to determine if it has expired. We “structure” data by populating fields in a database with material information. In this simple example, a contract would be linked to a database containing a field for end date. We accomplish this by abstracting the end date from the individual contract and populating the database field with the date. Once populated, the field enables us to quickly sort and filter contracts by end date and generate reports on pending expirations.
