Over time, an enterprise may come to have hundreds, thousands, and even millions of contracts in file sharing systems or on servers. This is a repository of valuable data that is rarely accessed and analyzed efficiently, especially if all your contract analysis is done manually. Yet contract discovery and analysis can yield some major benefits for any company.
Get a clearer vision
Automated analysis makes it possible to sift through enormous amounts of data that humans could never get through by hand. With a manual contract discovery and analysis, it can be hard to see the patterns of risks, opportunities, and obligations that you need to adjust for or take advantage of.
With this information collated and at your fingertips, your business vision becomes more clear. As legal requirements change, the regulatory landscape shifts, and business opportunities ebb and flow in one direction or another, you have the insights you need to take quick advantage.
Discover lost contracts
To manage your contracts using AI, you must first find them all and get them on-boarded. Contract documents are often scattered throughout your servers and computers, on systems from Dropbox to DocuSign. Just locating them all and getting them ready for analysis can be far more costly and time-consuming than a company estimates.
Robust contract discovery program software is capable of scanning many servers and locations simultaneously and finding all the relevant documents. They frequently find contracts that were completely forgotten. And once found, these contracts are all on-boarded.
Cut down on mundane tasks
With your contracts found and on-boarded, there are housekeeping tasks that need to be done. Doing them manually is mundane and a waste of time for valuable employees whose time and talents are more efficiently employed elsewhere.
Contract discovery and AI can automate these tasks and take them off your plate. Important functions the AI can perform for you include eliminating duplicate copies of contracts, finding and flagging up near-duplicates so you can decide whether to keep them, and creating a searchable database to make it simple to find the data you want later.
Get important insights
A crucial benefit to contract discovery is the performance insights that can be gleaned from analysis of individual contracts, specific types of contracts, and from all the contracts as a whole. These include deviations, risks, sales metrics, and cycle times.
Once the data has been mined, you can then set search queries that are as general or specific as you need, arranging the results in ways that are easy for you and your people to understand. You can decide what metrics you want to track and get that information updated and sent to you regularly as new contracts are added.
Reveal and reduce
Once you’re able to scan and analyze contracts quickly, opportunities open up. With dozens of pieces of contract intelligence at your fingertips, including all provisions, clauses, and terms, you can instantly spot opportunities to reduce corporate risk. You can see at a glance where you have risky transactions or areas of business, for example, where auto renewals might be hurting you, or places where local liability regulations are unfavorable.
The same information also reveals areas of potential revenue enhancement by flagging up where conditions are most favorable, where dynamic pricing is working, and where expansion has the best chance of success.
Manual contract reviews are costly and highly disruptive to the flow of business. By automating the process, you get instant access to the key metrics you need. Meanwhile, you’re free to concentrate on what you do best—building your business—while improving your overall vision of all your contractual relationships.
