Contract Review Meets E-discovery

Because they are so labor-intensive, contract reviews tend to be reserved

for pivotal events, but in an era when

e-discovery has become common, there is an opportunity to make good use of them more often. Many day-to-day business processes could benefit from a better understanding of company contracts, which even for mid-sized companies often number in the thousands. The processes, procedures, and technologies that make up e-discovery are well-suited to delivering those benefits.

The process starts with a foundation provided by e-discovery and its document review specialists, processes, and technologies, augmented by artificial intelligence (AI) that allows attorneys to teach analytics software to recognize and interpret contract provisions. An AI-powered contract review application applies this training to contracts it hasn’t seen before, resulting in the extraction of key contract provisions.

Technology-aided contract review is a natural companion to e-discovery and conventional contract management tools. Soon it will be common for machines, guided and taught by legal specialists, to select the documents that are relevant to a matter, extract the relevant content within each document and make that content available through a secure online system. A thousand contracts might take a group of attorneys 20 weeks to review. Automation could cut that time by 90 percent, freeing those attorneys for the more interesting and strategic aspects of their work.