Contract Analytics Get The Best Of Your Contracts

What is contract analytics?

The process of reviewing and extracting data from an organization’s contracts to enhance risk management encompasses the wide definition of ‘Contract Analytics’. Data extracted from legal documents, as well as paper copies, is transformed into a structured format using machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The business value of good contract analytics has increased tremendously due to the rise in contract digitization in pandemic times. Structured data from the analysis is now the cornerstone of the majority of business operations - driving value for the efficient working of the legal operations team.

A good contract analysis gets you the necessary data from:

• Incentives
• Policies
• Indemnifications
• Liabilities
• Clauses

What is the scope of contract analytics?

The data that contract analysis provides access to can do wonders for your contract lifecycle management. For example, you may require an overview of your contracting portfolio with a client to determine which contracts are near their expiry. It sorts through the relevant meta fields and assists you in grasping accurate information to obtain more insights.

Let us understand in-depth all the actionable information that you can derive from your contracts.

Parties to a contract

The information relating to parties, like their name, addresses, or contact numbers is the most overlooked piece of information in contracts. With analytics in place, you can easily keep track of this meta field and gain an overlook of their contracting profiles with you.

Renewal terms

Along with having a clear idea about the timeline of a contract, you may have to deal with numerous renewals. An automated tool for contract analytics integrated with CLM can send you smart alerts and indicate further actions. You can then analyze if the parties need to renew the contract manually or this can be done automatically. This saves not just the pain of keeping track of renewals but also helps with reducing the liability for missing deadlines.

Dates

With analytics, you can grasp a timeline of the contract, which includes signing dates, execution dates, or any other specific dates of importance. Evaluating a contract quickly can be done by looking at the timelines and deciding the steps to be taken ahead.

Termination

Very similar to renewals, a contract’s end dates are also a critical data point. Well-tuned analytics software can quickly show you the termination clauses and dates of a particular contract.

Importance of contract analytics

The most prominent benefit of using a CLM to analyze your agreements is to get valuable and accurate data insights that help to increase the productivity of the processes and business as a whole. Here are a few specific benefits that we can say a good contract analytics tool will give you.

Improve contract process

With the insights that contract analytics can derive, improving the contract cycle in its entirety becomes easy. There can be loopholes and delays in contract creation or negotiations, and analytics can help you understand why. Insights can help you identify terms in future terms of agreements that can be problematic or lengthy to formulate or negotiate. Such critical inside knowledge can assist you in speeding up the entire contract lifecycle.

Prevent poor quality contracts

Low-quality or inconsistent contracts are termed as one of the top causes of losing maximum revenue. This can happen either because of inconsistently drafted clauses, non-addition of standard clauses, scope creep, or performance issues. Analytics help you identify these loopholes and avoid making these leakages in future agreements.

Organization-wide agility

Manual contracting is a very rigid process and makes it hard for any company to be able to respond quickly to any untimely challenges. With CLM software, it becomes easy to anticipate challenges that could affect your contracting portfolio and become more agile in handling agreements and their terms. Having well-structured contract data at your disposal can make it easy for every department and the business overall to grow and scale faster. Having a central repository for keeping contract data readily available at your fingertips is the best way to achieve organization-wide agility.

Identify growth potential

Contract analytics examine the minute changes and clauses in a contract and identify growth opportunities. You can help your clients identify the possible opportunities of scaling up their revenue by analyzing the last segments' performance. Good analytics can provide you with actionable insights so work can be done on expanding the offerings.

Mitigate risks

Minimizing the risks in contracts is the essence of contracting for any business. Analyzing contracts help with reducing the risks and predicting problems before they happen. AI can be tuned to alert you of any off-contract buying or any other hidden risks.

How to select the best tool for contract analytics?

It is critical to understand primarily that artificial intelligence in contract analytics is not some magic that will do all your work. AI can only function as well as the data it gets to work on, which means that it has to be supplied with the right data sets to function to its maximum potential.

Here is our checklist to help you select the best contract analytics tool for your business

Easy to Use: No software or technology should be overwhelming to its users. It needs to be designed in a way that makes the employees welcome and eases their work. Any new system that gets adopted into an organization needs to gel well and quickly. The transition from an old system to a new one is the hardest for any organization to grasp. Making this phase seem not so daunting is what should tick the box when you select a CLM for contract analytics.

High Configurability: A rigid system isn’t a system at all. One glove doesn’t fit all in this innovative technology field. While selecting a CLM, make sure that the system is ready and has the ability to offer unlimited configurations depending upon your requirements.

Minimum Efforts: By this, we mean that the implementation of any new system is a two-way street. Even the best of systems fail when not implemented properly. However, the process of migration of old data onto the new platform should be a task that demands minimum effort from the employees and the technical team alike.

Reporting: The system has to offer a wide variety of configurable reports that can be used and tuned to serve your aims better. The data derived out of these reports needs to be easy to understand and laid out in a generalized as well as a specific manner for everyone.

Data Attributions: No AI and analytics can function well if it is not linked to accurate data attributes. A system that understands and allows you to design the data attributes the way you want will suit you the best.

Conclusion

Contract analytics revolutionizes contract management by leveraging AI and machine learning to extract valuable insights. From tracking parties to identifying growth opportunities, it enhances efficiency and agility. Prioritizing ease of use and configurability is crucial in selecting a tool. RazorSign’s CLM offers comprehensive analytics, empowering businesses to streamline operations and stay competitive.