Peer to Peer Magazine

63 WWW.ILTANET.ORG With intelligent contract management, your system is much more than a repository; you can extract the intelligence in your contracts to reduce cycle times, prevent risks and eliminate avoidable losses. Discovering Buried Potential Out-of-date contract management is hurting your business. Whether you are using filing cabinets and folders, shared network drives, or an older web-based solution, you are losing out on the huge opportunity to be gained from effectively managing your contracts. I am not talking about contract management in terms of an antiquated series of administrative tasks that move a document from draing to execution but rather the data in and around the contracts that give you more visibility and insight into your overall strategic business relationships. We now have refrigerators that tell us when we are running low on produce, watches that report how well we slept and cars that drive themselves — all because of data. What if your contracts could speak to your legal department like home appliances speak to our devices? What if obligations you spent months or years negotiating were not buried on the back pages of some quickly forgoen document but instead became fuel for proactively managing your business? What if the risks you accepted because you thought they were highly unlikely to occur were part of a profiling mechanism that gave your company advance warning of potential issues instead of you learning about the issues aer the lawsuit was filed? The data contained in and, more important, across your contracts can give you the big picture and help you navigate the regulatory and compliance landscape without adding headcount or slowing down the process. When data are properly harnessed, you can do more with less and do things faster. The lack of visibility into contract obligations and liabilities creates exposures to risk that cause aorneys to feel they need to review every contract in detail, regardless of risk profile or value. This is a drain on staff and leads to increased risk. These issues can snowball when the inefficient review process slows down the sales team's work and the finance team cannot recognize revenue and approve nonstandard Contract Intelligence: Uncovering the Riches You Already Have FEATURES deal terms. Altogether, a lack of visibility into contracts across the company creates legal risk, lost revenue and wasted time. Mapping the Data Collecting and analyzing all contract data does not have to be an additional drain on your resources. By applying proven ediscovery principles to the world of contracts, millions of data points can be identified, extracted and analyzed in a short time, providing metrics by which you can measure performance, evaluate risk and proactively manage the relationships upon which your company's success is built. First, your documents must be in a machine- encoded text format. If they are in Microso Word or even recent versions of PDF, they are probably ready for data extraction. If documents are scanned images or typed, handwrien or printed text, they will need to be run through a process called optical character recognition (OCR) which converts non-text documents into a format that can be electronically edited, searched and extracted. Next, using natural language processing, machine- learning and contextual data parsing, the document can be automatically broken down into relevant data "chunks" for extraction and analysis. Identical to the process of identifying relevant electronically stored information in ediscovery, these chunks represent data fields, clauses and other commercial and legal terms relevant to your proactive management and risk analysis of the contract. JASON SMITH Jason Smith is Senior Director and Legal Counsel for APTTUS. He currently chairs the Technology Committee for the State Bar of Texas Corporate Counsel Section and is the past Chair of the Computer & Technology Section. Jason is also a former member of the Editorial Board of the ABA's Law Practice Today magazine. He was named to Texas Magazine's list of top Houston lawyers for technology in 2014 and 2015 and was recently elected to become a Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation. Contact Jason at jsmith@apttus.com..

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