- February 21, 2024
- 15 min read
- Bethany Mullinix
Introduction
If you want to speak the universal language of business, then you need clear data that drives decision-making and improved outcomes. Legal teams extract this data through expert examination and review of contracts throughout their lifecycle. This approach to contract data analysis is laborious, time-consuming, and repetitive. While the analysis is necessary, the methods for achieving it have evolved over the last decade.
Contract analysis software now integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to reduce the time spent in review cycles, searching for contract clauses, and other burdensome manual tasks. Contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions also accelerate the time to business insights by automating data extraction.
In this actionable overview of the latest legal technology, we’ll explore how AI contract analysis streamlines and automates tasks to elevate the role of your legal department.
AI-powered Contract Analysis Tools and Terms
Before we dive in, there are a few AI-related terms that you should know to help you better understand how AI analysis works within a CLM. Each is a more complex topic, but here’s a brief overview.
1. Natural Language Processing (NLP)
If you have hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of contracts, searching for the one you need is daunting. This is where NLP makes a big difference.
NLP processes all the data in contracts into the natural language of AI. Then, NLP-powered contract analysis tools systematically manage that data and help draw inferences when missing data is in a contract. The result is easily searchable and accessible contracts that aid contract formatting.
2. Machine Learning (ML)
ML is your technology partner in the weeds, finding the areas where automation can improve workflows in areas easily overlooked. For example, with machine learning:
- You can determine how often contract renewals fail to include a new necessary clause.
- By ‘observing’ your contract review patterns over time, ML ‘learns’ to classify contracts based on their type, such as employment contracts, lease agreements, or purchase agreements.
- ML can also signal the likelihood of contract disputes or non-compliance based on historical data, enabling businesses to take proactive measures.
3. Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
Do you have a library of scanned copies of contracts? Or agreements stuck in old software that’s read-only images? OCR is how savvy legal teams ensure the data in these contracts doesn’t stay frozen forever. OCR converts the images to text readable by your CLM and other programs, making it easier to analyze and extract information from image-based files.
How do you use AI to Analyze Contracts?
The best way to incorporate AI into your contract analysis is to assign it repetitive, manual tasks that do not require the expertise of a highly trained legal team. A proven AI-powered CLM solution will exploit the advanced capabilities of NLP, ML, and OCR to your benefit. Once set up across your organization, it can:
- Convert all documents to easily searchable text, accelerating AI analysis.
- Automate the recommendation of clauses and templates to ensure consistency across the business and best practices.
- Monitor and send automated alerts associated with your contracts’ obligations, risks, and opportunities.
- Capture contracting trends in visual dashboards and reports that can drive proactive decision-making.
Extracting Actionable Contract Review Insights With Trusted AI
If we look more closely at how contract analysis works behind the scenes, we can see that there are many ways, beyond what we briefly discussed already, that AI works to automate the entire lifecycle of your contracts. Here are some key ways AI powers your processes and insights.
Data analysis
Through data analysis, AI empowers your legal team with real-time contract updates. Since all the information within contracts is now searchable, streamlined, and visible to stakeholders in a user-friendly record, the right parties can have accountability for their actions.
Contract review
With manual, repetitive tasks now effectively managed through ML, NLP, OCR, and AI-powered automation, the legal team intervenes to provide the necessary oversight and expertise. The speed of business increases and frees up legal team resources to focus on more complex and novel work.
Intelligent dashboards
Comprehensive, real-time dashboards and reports advance your assessment of supplier KPIs, workflow bottlenecks, and overall contract analytics. These dynamic visuals bring the data to life and translate complex legal jargon into the language of business data. More than just a pretty picture, these intelligent dashboards also drill down into data with graphical charts and pivot tables.
Extract key clauses and terms
ML and NLP are uniquely suited to processing large amounts of data and identifying patterns and inconsistencies. Modern legal teams use this to their advantage, automating everyday tasks like contract risk scoring based on extracting key clauses or terms. AI can monitor and maintain these standards by establishing templates and clauses in a CLM solution.
Pull out or highlight key information
By leveraging AI-powered contract analysis tools, legal teams don’t need to spend hours searching for one line from a historical contact. A centralized database with smart search capabilities accelerates the extraction of clauses or the option to highlight information critical to a transaction.
Monitor trends across your entire contract library
With a single source of truth for contract management, legal teams can monitor trends related to business relationships. They can also provide recommendations on which engagements are beneficial and which are below the current risk tolerance and to consider alternatives. With a dynamic AI-powered CLM solution, legal teams can also monitor trends within their department. They can track the time spent on the various stages of the contract lifecycle and improve their processes.
Track payment terms, obligations, and outcomes
Each organization operates differently, with unique contractual obligations and tracked outcomes. With AI-powered contract analysis, automation means flexibility–rules designed to adapt to how your business works and integrated prompts to help you stay on top of deadlines. Flexible automation lets you track diverse obligations and payment terms under various agreements.
3 Benefits of Contract Analysis by AI
1. Time and Cost Savings
When AI is at the foundation of your CLM solution, it transforms from a contract repository to a collaborative, streamlined platform with your legal team as the gatekeepers. The time and cost savings realized from shifting your skilled legal team away from repetitive, manual tasks to strategic partnerships and expert negotiating tactics can have a huge impact on your bottom line.
- By automatically creating records for each contract, including dates, contract details, owners, and all the related attachments.
- AI-driven data and text extraction lets you upload thousands of documents from disparate locations and systems.
- Real-time updates and alerts reduce time spent in reactive cycles that reduce efficiency.
2. Improved Accuracy and Consistency
Unlike your legal team, which wears multiple hats, your AI-powered contract analysis has one job. AI delivers consistent and accurate information in a user-friendly interface in real time. In this way, a CLM solution supports the legal team by establishing contract management standards and accelerating contract review. Doing so automates repetitive tasks requiring precision and reduces the risk of human error and inconsistencies.
3. Enhanced Risk Management
AI-assigned risk scoring has become popular for legal teams looking to provide an objective view of their organization’s contractual risks. With bulk analysis, you can identify and extract the clauses from each contract and compare them to your established AI-managed clause library. This helps you analyze threats based on identified inconsistencies and missing information. Analyzing historical contract data also gives you actionable insights into trends and drives smart decisions around the most urgent risks.
AI’s Ethical Implications and Limitations on Legal Technology
Adapting to technology advancements is nothing new for legal teams. To stay competitive, these teams must determine how best to leverage all the tools available to help them excel at their craft. Understanding AI and its benefits to contract management is part of adding value to an organization and advancing the strategic position of the legal team.
Part of this effort to understand AI should include reconciling its limits in contract management. Specifically, legal teams should protect their position as contract experts who exercise their role with integrity. Their trust and reliance on AI should always come second to the soundness of the contract. As suggested, the ideal model is to leverage AI contract analysis where it’s best fit-to-purpose and have the expert legal team function as gatekeepers.
Why Choose AI Contract Analysis Software?
While it may seem that AI is only now having its moment, smart legal teams have leveraged AI-powered CLM for over a decade. They have also catapulted their strategic position by streamlining and advancing the role of contracts in their organization. Through clear, actionable data tied to accountability, they are changing how contract analysis drives business decisions.
Leveraging an AI-powered contract analysis tool introduces substantial time and cost savings, improves accuracy and consistency, and enhances and disperses the role of risk management. With NLP, ML, and OCR integrated into your AI contract analysis, CLM becomes an integral part of your organization’s place in the modern, AI-powered world.
Click to learn more about how Sirion’s AI contract analysis capabilities are transforming legal departments around the world.
Additional Resources
AI Contract Negotiation: Benefits & Best Practices
Contract Management Reporting: A Mission-Critical Capability
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