Contract Challenges #3 – Searches depend on metadata

This is the third part of our Contract Challenges blog series – check out the first part and the second part!

OK, you have stored your signed contract (and other contract-related content) to a contract management solution. You might even have dozens or hundreds of contracts in your centralized archive. Good work!

Now, let’s say you have to look up some contract details. You pretty much know what you are looking for but you don’t have time to browse through all of your contracts. Instead, you log in to your contract archive and decide to try out the search feature.

Here’s where things often get tricky. In most contract management solutions, search is limited to the contract’s metadata fields, such as contract title and contract parties. This is the information that you defined during contract import (or if the solution is really smart, the metadata that the system automatically suggested to you).

If you want to find details outside the metadata, such as important dates, specific contract terms, renewals or attachments, for example, you are out of luck.

When the search functionality is limited to contract metadata, a lot of critical information is lost in the archives. Sure, you can browse the contracts page by page, but we all know that you never have the time for that.