How AI helps you through the contract management process

AI has quickly become a tool that helps legal professionals – and essentially anyone working with contracts – carry out their work more easily. From increasing personal productivity to making contracts more discoverable, AI has several applications.

Let’s take a look at how AI can help you over the entire contract management process, during the phase when you are creating your contract (pre-sign) to signing it and eventually with everything that happens after the contract is ready (post-sign).

To cash in on these benefits, you can use easily available tools like ChatGPT or check if your go-to CLM tool has these features built-in. A word of caution, though: if you’re working with sensitive content, check out our article on ChatGPT and privacy before you start.

Personal productivity for contract creation

During the pre-sign phase, the benefits of AI focus on personal productivity – creating contracts with more efficiency, confidence and consistency.

Here are some of the things you can do with ChatGPT, for example:

• Analyze and summarize large documents or reference material
• Draft contract language
• Look up terminology
• Create contract clauses
• Flag potential risks, inconsistencies or liabilities
• Proofread or translate text

Essentially, you can use ChatGPT to be your tireless legal assistant who carries out the tasks you assign. Alternatively, you can ask ChatGPT to assume the role of your counterparty and ask it to point out any sections that could be difficult to understand.

It all comes down to perfecting the skill of prompting: the more you interact with ChatGPT, the more possibilities you will discover.

A word of caution, though: remember that ultimately you will be responsible for the content created with AI, whether in the original language or a translated version. Generative AI is known to hallucinate at times, so make sure the final output is of high quality.

Automate your signing processes

Of all the phases during the contract management process, the signing phase probably has the least benefits from AI. By definition, signing involves a human interaction that cannot be outsourced to an AI – at least not yet.

However, you can make signing contracts as easy as possible by using electronic signing solutions, such as Zefort Sign, that allow you to send out signing requests regardless of time or place.

A good signing solution can do much of the work for you: it sends out signing requests in the order you want, it automatically sends reminders and finally archives the contract without any effort from you. This requires little or no AI magic – just good old digital process automation.

Post-signing AI benefits your entire organization

While during the pre-sign phase AI provides a lot of productivity benefits for individual experts, the post-sign phase can yield massive benefits for your entire organization.

Let’s assume you have hundreds, if not thousands, of contracts you need to look after. If your post-sign contract management solution comes with AI features, the time savings for your entire team quickly add up.

What’s more, depending on your contract solution, AI typically works under the hood and is fully automated.

For example, Zefort’s contract solution utilizes AI for the following:

• Automatically picking up metadata for new contracts, including any custom metadata you might want to use
• Providing a powerful search engine that allows you to even discover contracts that are similar with each other
• Automatically setting reminders and picking up important key dates, so that you never miss an important deadline

These kinds of features are available for all users – not just the individual who created the document in the first place.

In addition, chat-based AIs can be used to interact with your documents during the post-sign phase, too. For example, Zefort has a secure ChatGPT integration that essentially allows you to make ChatGPT your personal assistant for analyzing any existing contract. What’s best, you don’t have to worry about submitting your document to an external service – it all happens inside the secure contract archive.

Start utilizing AI today

Are you ready to give AI a try? If you’re already using Zefort, you probably already have utilized its AI features – most of them come built in and are automatically available for all users. In case you want to really level up your AI game, we recommend starting with Zefort’s ChatGPT integration or even with the all-inclusive Advanced AI package.