Contract Review Meets E-Discovery

“Anyone who has had the dubious pleasure of reviewing contracts for a legal, regulatory, or business matter knows that nothing about it is painless,” writes Deloitte’s Richard Vestuto. Often overlooked, he says, is that technology that has been developed in the last decade can pretty much put an end to the pain. With minor tweaks, software that is being used to find and organize documents for discovery in litigation can be applied to contract management, something that for big companies – especially older companies – can be a massive job. Start with the foundations provided by e-discovery and its document review function, Vestuto suggests, then add artificial intelligence (AI) in a way that allows attorneys to teach the software to recognize and interpret contract provisions. “A thousand contracts might take a group of attorneys 20 weeks to review,” he says. “Automation could cut that time by 90 percent, freeing those attorneys for the more interesting and strategic aspects of their work.”