Is your existing contract archive keeping you up at night?

Let’s take a quick look at a fairly normal company. The company has acquired a few other businesses and gone through a few enterprise IT system updates or mergers. The end result is that contracts are being maintained in several different IT systems and some of the contracts lack all metadata.

On top of this, the same systems are used to store other documents as well, not just contracts.

And now, someone (perhaps even you?) has the pleasant responsibility of rounding up all contractual obligations the company currently has. With the data scattered all over the place, the only option is to roll up your sleeves, brew a large pot of coffee and start going through the documents – file by file, folder by folder.

Have you been there?

It’s probably not any consolation, but you are not alone. In fact, it’s actually the new normal that a company’s contracts are all over the place with insufficient or completely missing metadata (customer contracts may be an exception to this norm).

So, if the lights are on in the middle of the night in the office building next to you, they are probably going through their contracts as well, one by one.

Here’s a math exercise: you have a total of 2,000 files, and it takes on average 15 minutes to go through one file (some files are quicker, some take double the time). The resulting workload corresponds to approximately 3 full months for a single person.

I’m willing to bet good money that there are very few volunteers for this task.

However, looking up the desired contract provisions from even a huge contract archive is an excellent task for an automated AI system. Here at Zefort, we have completed several contract takeover projects where we efficiently find just the right data from a large pool of existing contracts.

Your effort in the project is basically just telling us what you want and rounding up the files.

An AI-powered contract takeover project takes typically just some weeks, assuming that your documents are mostly in PDF and easily available. Your effort in the project is basically just telling us what you want and rounding up the files.

A contract takeover project breaks down as follows:

1. A kick-off meeting, where we together define the scope of the project and what metadata is important for you.

2. Delivery of the contract files over to Zefort, using a secure flash drive or any method preferred by you.

3. Teaching the AI with a smallish sample of the contract base.

4. First processing run of the contracts and validation of the results by Zefort.

5. AI optimization and a status meeting with you (and returning to step 4, if needed).

6. Delivering the results – including not only the metadata but also interesting phenomenons and insights –  in your preferred format, such as CSV or JSON, and going through the results together.