Automation Credit: Urupong Phunkoed/Shutterstock.com

 

For the last few weeks, we have faced a lot of uncertainty, personally and professionally. In the current climate, companies and law firms have had to make difficult financial business decisions. Some have already reduced headcount or put projects on hold, and others may soon have no other choice. This is the sobering reality for most businesses. For those wrestling with these decisions, it's challenging to see a light at the end of the tunnel. But there is a way forward amid this fog of uncertainty—and it's contained in the historical work product your already have at your fingertips.

Companies across all industries have a wealth of knowledge stored in their contracts. However, that knowledge is often difficult to access and interpret.

When furloughs or layoffs are necessary and valued employees walk out the door, they take with them their institutional knowledge. As a result, the remaining employees are required to take on more tasks with fewer resources. This makes business continuity a major challenge at a time when maintaining strong operations is more important than ever.

Consider the workflow and processes that many legal departments use for creating and executing contracts. Even when many of an organization's contracts are similar in nature, each contract tends to be managed individually, with different members of the legal department working with different members of the business and sales teams. Attorneys from both sides of an agreement must carefully review, edit and customize each one. There are often multiple back-and-forth exchanges between parties, as well as between internal team members. Once the contracts are finalized and executed, they are generally filed and rarely viewed again. When the next contract arises, the process begins all over again.

While this labor-intensive workflow consumes a great deal of time and effort, the long-term payoff is modest in proportion to costs—exactly the kind of process that many organizations cannot afford right now.

Retaining Your Institutional Knowledge

Of course, many in-house attorneys and staff have developed good working relationships with their business counterparts. This makes it possible to anticipate the needs of the business, streamline the negotiation and review process, and react quickly to allow for speedier contract execution. Those advantages are likely to evaporate, however, when headcounts are reduced. When the employees who have worked on past and current contracts leave the organization, their experience and knowledge of what is contained in those contracts goes with them. This will almost certainly make the review process more difficult and, ultimately, more expensive.

With advanced contract automation technology, however, legal departments can leverage institutional knowledge buried in contracts to review and execute changes with much greater efficiency, while at the same time developing a deeper understanding of what their contracts contain. This generates insights—on a macro level, across multiple contracts—into how a company's contracts have been managed in the past.

Deep learning and natural language processing help by significantly speeding up the review process and eliminate much of the protracted back and forth between lawyers and businesspeople.

Turning to Technology as a Replacement Tool

Before the current crisis, a lot was said about the way AI-powered tools might affect the legal workforce—and which of those tools might be worth getting behind. The best use case for putting expert automation tools to the test has arrived. In fact, automated contract tools that edit contracts like a lawyer can automate as much as 70% of human review time. This kind of ROI offers relief to companies that are pressed to keep business moving forward while fulfilling the challenging mandate of cost-cutting and eliminating redundancies.

How do these tools differ from other technologies on the market, you ask? By recognizing semantic patterns in contracts and providing suggestions for changes, instead of simply identifying possible clauses that are inconsistent with the organization's standards and best practices, the process doesn't just become faster and more automated—it becomes better. Quality increases iteratively as the technology "learns" more, providing more consistency and precision across matters.

Implementation of agile tools such as this allows the legal department to seamlessly integrate it with the organization's current workflows and processes. This will minimize the need for extra training, help eliminate bottlenecks and make it easier for remaining employees to focus on the more strategically important aspects of their jobs.

Amid a struggling economy, automated contract markup allows organizations to retain institutional knowledge while developing more efficient review methods, even when the employees who worked on previous contracts are no longer with the organization. When contracts are executed quickly, accurately and with a high degree of consistency, the company and its clients benefit. And when the economy rebounds, as it inevitably will, the company will already have access to a vast body of actionable insight into its contracts that it can leverage for years to come.

 

Dan Broderick is the CEO and co-founder of BlackBoiler, a contract review company that uses proprietary deep learning and natural language processing to speed up the process of high-volume contract review for Fortune 500 companies and AmLaw 100 law firms.