A lot of companies are shifting to contract analytics from the manual process as they concur with the visible benefits of in-depth risk management. With this technology in place, Zycus has proved to be one of the leading providers in the AI-powered CLM space. It has been specifically noted for its enterprise-grade Contract Analytics capabilities in the Forrester’s Now Tech – Contract Lifecycle Management, 2020 report.
Being well-equipped with the nuances of legal technology, Zycus had recently conducted a webinar with IACCM on how Contract Analytics helps identify, manage, and mitigate risks. The speakers included Arthur Raguette, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of Zycus, and Paul Branch, Chief Operations Officer and Chief Technology Officer of IACCM.
No worries if you’ve missed the session. You can always watch it here. For your further convenience, Zycus is presenting a rundown of the webinar so that you get a rough idea of what the webinar was all about.
Let’s begin with some insights by IACCM. A survey conducted by the organization has found that out of the 507 organizations that participated in the survey, 64% reported that they do not have any meaningful automation that supports contract management. However, 81% of the respondents either have or will now develop plans to implement, replace, or add to contract automation.
But why is automation such a big deal in contract management? To understand this, we must throw light on some of the major challenges in traditional contracting, including siloed and complex processes, expensive governance and management of contract performance, difficulty in extracting data from contracts. To top these, manual contracting is cumbersome, error-prone, and time-consuming.
Now, let’s see how emerging technologies like AI, Machine Learning, Semantic Analysis, and NLP can drive the change and make contracting easier:
- Help non-legal teams in understanding the nuances of complex contract language
- Extract and use contract-related data for analysis
- Provide insightful information to executive teams
- Improve resilience and adaptability of organizations
Artificial Intelligence led Contract Analytics Technology
We cannot leave out Analytics while talking about legal technology. Artificial Intelligence powered Contract Analytics technology is rightfully the master of contract management due to its following capabilities:
- Self-Learning – Accelerates data analysis to get critical business insights using AI/ML to predict and mitigate risk factors.
- Comprehensive – Goes beyond search by extracting metadata for tracking obligations, entitlements, KPIs, etc.
- Scalable – Enterprise-wide user adoption that can process thousands of contracts and documents at a time.
- Intelligent – Trainable, embedded machine learning “learns” behavior from your actions and data sources incrementally, improving accurate results.
- Integrable – Uses APIs so the processed data and analysis can be populated to third party applications for visualization or other purposes.
How Contract Analytics Adds Value to Contract Management?
Advanced Search and Extraction
- Converts volumes of contracts from different formats simultaneously into searchable documents using OCR/NLP.
- Classifies metadata into categories and performs full-text indexing to make contract data portable for decision making.
- Extracts standard clauses and metadata elements like effective dates and counter-party names.
- Normalizes extracted data associated with individual contracts if required.
Smart Review and Analysis
- Speeds the review process by sending individual or bulk contracts for review to the appropriate reviewers.
- Analyzes risk in contracts by identifying sub-optimal terms, highlighting missing clauses and deviations between standard and outside contracts.
- Identifies compliance gaps, modifies existing contracts and updates the stakeholders.
Real-time Insights
- Maps trends in key metadata elements like effective dates, average contract terms, payment terms, liabilities caps, etc.
- Alarms and notifies stakeholders to monitor key contract performance data.
- Provides insights on performance KPIs, milestones, and obligations that can be transported to visualization tools.
Different Teams Benefitting from AI-led Contract Analytics
Legal Operations: In house corporate legal teams can respond faster to external events, internal requests, and crisis situations by extracting obligations, deliverables, milestones, policy, and regulatory commitments.
Procurement: Procurement teams can increase savings, monitor risk, and perform supplier evaluation by extracting the terms, pricing, delivery obligations, payment terms, renewal clauses, and product/service performance SLAs.
Mergers and Acquisitions: M&A teams can simplify the process, standardize their contracting practice, and gain insights by reviewing thousands of contracts to detect obligations, irregularities, and hidden liabilities.
Sales: Sales operations teams can optimize resources and focus on initiating, maintaining, and expanding customer relationships by spotting trends in negotiation terms and identifying key contract levers that enable teams to close business quicker.
Finance and Risk Management: Organizations can realize maximum contract value while managing risk with proactive insights and compliance by monitoring performance against obligations and entitlements and ensuring best practices to manage compliances with international law.
How can Zycus Merlin Explorer and Protector Help Your Business?
- Drives Better Business Outcomes – Allows improved business decisions by interrogating governance-ready contract data with improved visibility and cross-team collaborations.
- Reduces Organizational Risks – Mitigates risk exposure by analyzing and flagging missing contract elements and outliers, ensuring necessary consistencies in terminologies, phrases, and terms.
- Identifies Cost Savings – Performs accurate analysis of third-party and legacy contracts to get insights into purchase commitments, milestones, and obligations, which highlights cost reduction opportunities.
- Improves Compliance and Regulatory Mandates – Monitors key regulatory compliance requirements, efficiently responds to regulatory audit requests, and helps to amend contracts swiftly to keep up with evolving regulatory requirements.
Watch our full webinar to gain a deeper understanding of the utility of Contract Analytics with detailed analysis of use cases involving – Risk and Obligation Identification and Penalty Avoidance, Contract Risk Analysis with an example of M&A, and Contract Discovery with an example of a supplier.
If you are keen to know more about the latest and growing legal technology, do not miss our upcoming Emerging Technologies – 101 workshop with IACCM, where Arthur Raguette & Paul Branch discuss the benefits of applying new technologies like AI and Machine Learning with real-life implementation examples as well as hands-on exercises on technology evaluation and selection. Book your seat today!
