Contract Abstraction: A Beginner’s Guide For 2024

Content

• What is contract abstraction?
• Why is contract abstraction crucial?
• What are the challenges of manual contract abstraction?
• What are the best practices for contract abstraction?
• Centralized repository
• Clause extraction
• Clause comparison
• Contract summary

Every detail in a contractual agreement is crucial to a company's functioning. However, owing to the complexities and length of contracts, organizations often have to stretch their resources and time to keep track of all the terms and conditions. Legal teams must go through each document individually to extract pertinent information.

These outdated and manual processes make the parties vulnerable to missed deadlines, breaches, or even drawn-out contract lifecycles. That, without a doubt, hinders companies' ability to onboard suppliers, clients, and staff promptly. Then, how do you gain visibility into critical contract data while maintaining accuracy and speed? This is where businesses can benefit from contract abstractions.

What is contract abstraction?

Contract abstraction summarizes and extracts critical information from lengthy and complex contractual agreements. It entails locating clauses, dates, obligations, and other pertinent terms inside a contract to produce a structured and streamlined summary. 

An abstraction, a condensed version of a contract, provides a quick and easy reference point for understanding the essential details of a contract without having to review the entire document. These summaries enable non-legal stakeholders to comprehend complex terms and legalese parts of business agreements. They can utilize abstracts throughout the contractual relationship to review, approve, and manage terms and conditions. It is particularly beneficial for scaling organizations looking to accelerate contract management. 

Why is contract abstraction crucial?

The sheer volume of contracts that legal teams and contract managers deal with daily can be overwhelming. But despite the massiveness of the task, businesses must do their best to stay on top of every piece of information within the contractual agreements. Hence, most organizations rely on abstraction to simplify contracts and facilitate monitoring.

Time and cost efficiency

Manually going through a large volume of contracts can be time-consuming and cause unnecessary delays in business operations. Contract abstractions, on the other hand, streamline the process by extracting relevant clauses and milestones from the document. It enables legal teams and contract managers to focus on high-value tasks and contract management activities.

Mitigate risks

Contracts contain vital information governing business operations and relationships. That is why organizations must monitor them regularly to identify potential issues. Contract abstracts allow stakeholders to do so by providing insight into compliance, relevant terms, and milestones. Thus, they can proactively address them and mitigate legal, operational, and financial risks. It safeguards the company's interests throughout the contractual relationship.

Improved decision-making

Informed decisions are vital to continuous success in contractual relationships. Access to clear and concise contract summaries at every stage of the contract lifecycle streamlines processes.  Whether negotiating new contracts, renewing existing agreements, or resolving disputes, having accurate information readily available empowers businesses to act decisively and in their best interests. It also helps to ensure everyone across the organization is on the same page. 

Enhanced compliance

Compliance with regulatory requirements is essential for businesses to operate ethically and avoid legal repercussions. They also need to ensure everyone performs their responsibilities as outlined in the agreement without fail. Contract abstraction ensures that companies know their obligations and can adhere to them effectively.

What are the challenges of manual contract abstraction?

Manual contract abstraction involves reading through contracts line by line. The next step is identifying key clauses, dates, obligations, and other relevant details. Most organizations store this information in shared drives, spreadsheets, databases, or contract management systems. While this may seem straightforward, the reality is far from it. Here are some of the common challenges businesses face when dealing with manually summarizing contracts:

Time-consuming process

Individually, going over thousands of contracts would take a lot of time and careful attention to detail. Legal professionals often spend hours sifting through intricate legal documents, extracting information piece by piece. It eats up valuable time but also takes away from more strategic tasks that could add value to the business.

Human error

With manual contract abstraction, the risk of human error is high. A company may suffer long-term effects if employees misread a clause, miss deadlines, or enter inaccurate data. These errors can lead to compliance issues, financial losses, and even legal disputes.

Limited scalability

Manual abstraction becomes increasingly unsustainable as businesses grow and the volume of contracts increases. It means endless administrative tasks to retrieve necessary information and keep up with their contract management needs.

What are the best practices for contract abstraction?

Nowadays, most organizations have moved past filing cabinets and shared folders to handle their business contracts. They can now perform every step of the contract lifecycle online, from writing to negotiating to signing. Moreover, automated solutions and AI technology are available to streamline every task, including contract abstraction. Here’s how you can do it using Dock 365 contract management software:

Centralized repository

Dock offers digital repositories to centralize and store all contract-related information in one easily accessible location. They make it easier for businesses to analyze and manage their contracts effectively. Also, they can extract key data points from contracts within seconds. Organizations can automate the extraction process, saving time and resources, using repositories. They can ensure the extracted data is accurate and error-free. 

Consequently, it reduces the risk of misinterpretation or oversight when analyzing contract terms and obligations. Businesses can easily track and monitor compliance with contractual obligations by centralizing all contract data. They support risk mitigation and guarantee that all parties follow the terms of the agreement.

Clause extraction

Gone are the days of manually sifting through lengthy contracts to find specific clauses. Dock’s clause extraction enables businesses to extract relevant information within seconds automatically. The system swiftly identifies crucial contract clauses, such as payment terms, termination clauses, and confidentiality agreements, by using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. It considerably reduces time and the risk of human error. As a result, the legal team can devote time to other crucial duties.

These extracted clauses are available in the format of easily digestible contract reports. Regardless of the type of contract—from SOWs to NDAs to vendor agreements—businesses can rapidly ascertain the main terms and conditions without reading every word. Dock also allows organizations to set up notifications to track these extracted obligations. Thus, they can guarantee compliance and performance throughout the contractual relationship.

Clause comparison

Businesses must ensure the terms are clear, comprehensive, and favorable to all parties involved during the drafting process. By comparing clauses in third-party contracts, they can identify potential gaps or inconsistencies in the agreement. AI-powered contract management allows businesses to scan through vast amounts of text in a fraction of the time it would take a human, highlighting key differences, similarities, and discrepancies. 

Additionally, comparing clauses can help you determine which provisions are standard industry practices and which may need changes. Dock allows them to make the necessary revisions to address them. They can either replace them with standard clauses from the library or create entirely new ones using OpenAI. 

Contract summary

A contract summary, just as an abstraction, is a condensed version of a contractual agreement. It highlights the most crucial aspects of the business contract clearly and accurately. It serves as a quick reference guide for the parties involved, outlining the essential terms, conditions, rights, and obligations without the need to sift through the entire document.

Dock utilizes AI and NLP to identify and extract critical terms and provisions. Then, users can automatically categorize them into various types, including payment terms, deliverables, deadlines, termination clauses, and dispute resolution mechanisms. Dock breaks down legal jargon and complex language to make the information easily understandable to all parties involved.