Why Companies Are Investing In Contract Management Software

For centuries, the business world has been dependent upon paperwork.

11:22 29 November 2019

The language of contracts, legal agreements, bills of sale, receipts, memos, and accounting statements were the very lifeblood of business. Then along came computers, and for a few decades we were all promised "the paper-free office." We all waited patiently for the day, but it never quite came through. While it's true that electronic documents have cut down on the physical bulk of pages, paperwork remains as central to the importance of business as ever.

But now companies are finding themselves in a bind if they stay too far behind the technology curve, because business tech has taken some pretty long strides in the last few years. On the one hand, adapting to these new business logistics takes time and training, without much tangible benefit that you can point to on a quarterly report. But on the other, if your competitor finds a faster and more efficient method of handling their workload, you'd better catch up or find yourself out of the market.

The New Artificial Intelligence Standard

Most business people tend to tune out when the subject of AI is brought up, because again, we've been promised so much for so many years from this field which has delivered little up until now. The difference now is that AI research has abandoned all pretense of inventing some sentient talking android from science fiction, and embraced practical, nuts-and-bolts tasks that computers can tackle more capably.

There are still people who will be shocked if you tell them that we have artificial intelligence systems that can read. The catch is, they can't read a novel (at least not with purpose), but they can be trained to parse huge swaths of textual data and assimilate some useful functions from it. Google and other search engines have been doing something in the same vein for years.

Indeed, the concept of semantic contextualization was the original vision of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, who originally envisioned "the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy, and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines." He described them as "intelligent agents" and predicted that they would become possible. Score one for Berners-Lee, then, because AI intelligent agents are around us now, from Amazon Echoes and Apple Siris placing our orders to autonomous drones and automated contract management software.

Contract Management By An AI Paralegal

Contract management software is able to leaf through a thick contract and pull out the relevant clauses we want at our fingertips - only doing so in seconds instead of eating up half a day. For example, we might want to look through our contract library to quickly find key clauses like:

• Confidentiality terms
  
  
• Force majeure standards
  
  
• Termination triggers
  
  
• Jurisdiction boundaries
  
  
• Dispute resolution procedures
  
  
• Damage handling
  
  

One can easily picture needing to know one of these crucial facts just before a negotiation meeting or a big sales pitch. With contract management software, you don't need to manually shuffle through this paperwork pulling out dates, dollar amounts, named parties, and other definitions. You just feed the contract into the system and it digests it all into a spreadsheet on screen.

One company which produces such software, Evisort, has been a major draw for Silicon Valley investors. They've raised well over $5 million in investor funding from start-up incubators funded by such tech giants as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Evisort is so far the only company that is offering an actual IA system that can actually read through the paperwork and automate data searches.

The founders of Evisort, a solid mix of MIT and Harvard Law talent, are ambitiously ahead of the curve in this regard. This style of "agile" contract handling is gaining demand from companies of every size, who naturally want to free up resources in their overworked legal departments. Evisort's Twitter feed is checkered with posts offering career positions at an ever-growing rate, thanks to their exponential growth per quarter from a portfolio of clients that include Fortune 500 companies.

Other contract management software companies, even without the AI part, are always seeking to create a more streamlined office document handling interface. Products like Concord, Parlay Pro, and Agiloft are claiming the domain of contract assistance tools. Sites like BusinessWire predict a $2.9 billion market in this field in just a few years.

This point in technology was inevitable, it seems. A leaner, more agile business world that automates away the tedium is on the horizon at last.