With contract management situated at the heart of most legal department work, it is the best place to start when describing real-world uses of AI technology.
Let’s take a look at 3 typical examples of how AI can make legal work easier.
1. Contract indexing
Nowadays, it is impossible to imagine understanding a new PDF contract just by clicking through it. More concretely, the lawyers can load their file into the AI software, the process starts, and within a few seconds, the user will receive a report containing all the key information extracted from the contract. Before AI, it would take on average 20 minutes for a lawyer to understand a new contract; with AI-assisted contract review, it will take between 4-5 minutes with the lawyer’s analytical skills, which are still crucial in detecting anomalies, as the law itself remains complex and certain subtleties may escape the machine.
Traditionally, to compile reports, get alerted on contracts and search for a single company contract among thousands, you would need to have them all recorded beforehand. This work is not only time-consuming, but it leads to a build-up of contract archives scattered across the business. As a result, lawyers tend to prioritise these archives by only recording risky contracts, i.e. those with priority maturities or those formatted in the same way. This means that the recovery of historical records becomes just as complicated to deal with. What could be more frustrating when you deploy legal software than to open it and find that it is completely empty – especially when the company has negotiated thousands of contracts.
AI makes it possible to mass import your contract database. The idea is to be able to deal with an archive of contracts that lawyers simply never have the time to manage. This is a major step forward in terms of reliably securing the company’s assets – and the AI integrated software can do this instantly.
2. Contract review
Corporate lawyers spend hours reviewing contracts and exchanging versions back and forth. This time could and should be used for high-value tasks. With AI, you will be able to control recordkeeping roles like entity and document management and gain efficiency by spending less time searching for key clauses or identifying red flags in contracts.
AI can improve accuracy by easily matching agreements to your own internal policies, making your review process faster and more accurate at the same time. A smart AI tool can use your compliance playbook to analyse client contracts and spot potential issues.
3. Contract analysis
By specialising in contract analysis, you can gather key information about a contract via machine reading. The machine is not only trained to understand different languages but also the precise legal language used in each type of document. This will allow you to extract useful information from unstructured data, with systems that accelerate the information age, helping users with a broad range of tasks, from identifying unique opportunities, risks etc.
With AI, legal departments can gain more value from the data they already have as well as unify the data, make predictions and eventually better-informed decisions.
