Peer to Peer Magazine

64 PEER TO PEER: THE QUARTERLY MAGAZINE OF ILTA | SPRING 2017 FEATURES Contract Intelligence: Uncovering the Riches You Already Have This process reveals the stark truth about contracts: They are not documents with meaning about a single transaction, they are collections of data points about a relationship that may have significant implications beyond the four corners of the single piece of paper. Extracting this data gives you the ability to create a DNA map on the transaction, related transactions, relevant business relationships, compliance and more. It paints a broad picture that arms your legal department (and your sales team) with knowledge that can be leveraged in future negotiations. It also gives your compliance team the data points they need to protect the company properly. Your Most Important Commodity Contracts do not have to be housed in a rigid system of inflexible processes and managed by data entry personnel. Tools on the market can automate this administrative activity and interact with users in a friendlier, less burdensome interface. Just like Alexa, Just like Alexa, Cortana and Siri have revolutionized human-computer interaction, some contract management systems now come with their own "intelligent agents." Cortana and Siri have revolutionized human-computer interaction, some contract management systems now come with their own "intelligent agents." An intelligent agent can listen to voice commands, understand text inputs and interact with staff in augmented reality environments to provide guidance on draing, negotiating and executing a contract, utilizing the vast amounts of underlying contract and transactional data you already have in hand. For instance, in a world where regulatory changes seem to be a daily occurrence, imagine being able to identify quickly all contracts affected by upcoming changes to ASC606/IFRS15 or Brexit. Mergers and acquisitions involve a substantial level of due diligence into existing rights and obligations of the acquired company. By leveraging the data inside the target's contracts, you can easily assess the risk profile of the transaction in minutes instead of the months it would take an army of contract reviewers to perform this task. If you have a repository and have been diligent about collecting specific data points for each document profile record, a new business strategy, regulation or world event could incentivize you to evaluate existing contracts to identify a new data point. Instead of hiring an army of highly paid contract reviewers, most of whom likely are not familiar with your contracts or business strategies, you can use contract discovery tools to crawl through all your existing contracts to find and extract the important piece of information needed without adding head count. This is important because data have become one of the most important commodities in our world. According to the World Economic Forum, data are now a separate asset class. From Amazon to Uber to Facebook and Netflix, data have driven a rise in collective intelligence through connectivity. It is only natural that applying the same data-driven principles to your contracts can yield incredible results and competitive differentiation. Converting your contracts from simple documents stored out of sight into data- driven, crowd-sourced prediction and advisory engines can innovate and optimize the way you do business in real-time. P2P

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