AI data capture from contracts gets 99% of the attention, but there’s an even more critical step hiding in plain sight.
Contracts are made up of multiple documents. For any interpretation of a contract to make sense, you first need to make sure you’re looking at every single one of the documents that make it up. And they have to be in the right order, since contract documents follow an order of precedence.
It’s a hard problem. Just imagine starting with a flat, unordered pile of 30,000 terribly-named documents. Of the astronomical number of combinations you could group them into, only one of them is correct.
Most companies are a world away from this correct grouping. They unceremoniously dump their documents into a junkyard filesystem (and that’s if they’ve graduated past letting those documents rot in their email inbox).
Anyone that sells “we plug into your existing filesystem” as a benefit is therefore conning you. It’s just a way to avoid the extremely tough, hard-to-automate work that enables subsequent steps. There is no shortcut. If you don’t do it, everything you do downstream (like AI data capture) is a waste of time.
If you do it, you immediately unlock a huge amount of value. Even if you stop there.