Moving Beyond Basic Contract Analytics to Maximize Contract Management Insight and Performance

Imagine your company has been presented with a very generous buyout offer and you’ve been tasked with facilitating the due diligence process over the next two weeks. In addition to finding all your company’s contracts, you’re charged with assessing any nonstandard terms within these contracts that could potentially impact the deal, including any unconventional assignment provisions. Fortunately for you, your company already has an existing contract management system that you can count on to find every contract, identify the stipulated clauses and assimilate the risk, just in time for the next big meeting.

Right? Wrong. Why? Two key reasons:

  1. Not all contracts are stored in the contract management system or any other system.
  2. There’s a vast range of unique, high-risk, nonstandard clauses that aren’t currently tracked in any system, especially with many third-party contracts.

These challenges are replicated in many other every-day scenarios, such as:

  • The lead attorney of a major retail organization was just tasked with isolating the high-priority notification requirements across those contracts affected by today’s cyber breach
  • An in-house counsel is entrusted with finding specific terms within your contracts in order to respond to a one-off regulatory compliance request

Finding atypical clauses in these situations continues to be a volume vs. time vs. accuracy/completeness challenge—the manual review of thousands of contracts in a limited timeframe.

Contract analytics to the rescue

The above examples highlight a gap in traditional contract management: true contract analytics. Your existing in-house systems (CLM, CRM, ERP) can help you track a percentage of your organization’s contracts (rarely is it ever close to 100%) and provide a variety of pre-defined structured metadata. Each system houses different information, but even when put together, they still don’t add up to the whole picture.

As pointed out by Craig Conte of Capgemini, analytics in the contract management world isn’t just “the number of contracts signed or total contract value of contracts and termination date reporting.” These simplistic analytics are achievable through existing systems since they rely on consistent data formats that have often already been manually keyed into these systems from contract language. Unfortunately, contract language is extremely varied and subjective and requires far more sophisticated analytics to find information that not only matches what you’re looking for but also comes close in proximity. Given the wide range of scenarios that demand this agility and flexibility, it’s nearly impossible to define and capture all potential variations of contract information requirements requiring analysis.

DocuSign Insight delivers a proven combination of AI technologies—natural language processing, machine learning, latent semantic indexing, OCR and rules-based logic—to help organizations manage and analyze their agreements. Insight brings together agreements from across your enterprise in virtually any location and format. Advanced search and filtering lets you zero in on the ones that matter. Automated extraction policies identify the clauses and terms you need to review.  And you can easily view side-by-side comparisons of key terms across selected agreements, to quickly spot inconsistencies.

Learn more about DocuSign Insight here.

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