Accelerating Legal Negotiation with Contract Analytics

The application of AI solutions for contract analytics is becoming commonplace in the legal field. We’ve seen it being used to analyze thousands of executed contracts, especially when it’s essential to extract core information for regulatory, cost containment or revenue enhancement projects. It’s also become more prevalent in the contract negotiation or pre-execution phase. However, what comes along with that are several hurdles to efficient use in daily practice, especially concerning third-party contracts in deal negotiation and the overall process and workflow.

Lawyers live in a world of Microsoft Word, which for most of them is the only interface they know: 90% of legal professionals use it every day, and 63% of those surveyed consider it to be “crucially important” to their daily work.1 Thus, a decline in overall efficiency due to the switching back and forth between software during the negotiation process is a major and common cost. For example, sending emails with attachments back and forth can result in technical issues like version control and markup, but even more importantly, analyzing the contract received from the third party and benchmarking it against internal standards in order to identify any risk becomes a significant challenge to address, especially if the lawyer has to switch between different applications.

Over the years our experience with clients has been that they have significant difficulty keeping an up-to-date clause library or playbook, a key tool when dealing with clauses and contract language that deviate from their own standards or acceptable levels. Additionally, it’s always a challenge to keep track of what’s still effective, which clauses are to be used or need to be replaced.

DocuSign Analyzer helps organizations negotiate better agreements, faster with the power of AI. 

  • Extract key terms and clauses from inbound agreements automatically
  • Generate interactive risk scorecards based on your company’s legal and business policies
  • Quickly access pre-approved alternate clauses so you can “fix-it-before-you-sign-it”
  • Get more business done while reducing organizational risk
  • Enable a smoother, less tedious negotiation process for everyone involved

DocuSign Analyzer takes the internal process of review to the next level. It detects discrepancies and missing clauses and then highlights the differences between the contract elements and their annexes. This enables effective clause comparison and real-time risk scoring based on a self-defined dynamic risk model. One of the greatest advantages of DocuSign Analyzer is that it leverages an already available configuration in DocuSign Insight. 

For more information on DocuSign Analyzer, visit the product page or read the press release. 

Guest blog contributed by Felix Rackwitz, lawyer and managing director, TPR Legal

1https://infowaregroup.com/blog/3-statistics-you-should-know-about-micro…

Published