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Artificial intelligence (AI) is already sharpening professional methods across a variety of industries.  However, advancements in AI can be particularly advantageous as they apply to contract management software systems – if contract intelligence engines built upon a foundation of machine learning are fed a nutritious diet of relevant contract data.

How AI is Changing Contract Management

Cast aside apocalyptic visions of malevolent androids.  Artificial intelligence in contract management is designed to enable contract professionals to focus on strategizing and making informed decisions with an enhanced understanding of contract risk and the positive and negative relationships between data, contract language, and contract processes.

Do not worry; contract AI cannot replace contract management professionals; instead, it is designed to streamline data insertion, data extraction, data protection measures, and risk identification tasks with automated data entry and risk assessment mapping.  AI-powered contract management software transforms static contract documents and contract data into dynamic building blocks that contract management professionals need for improved contract oversight, proactive opportunity identification, and risk mitigation.

Artificial Intelligence and Agreement Data

Contract management artificial intelligence users can select specific data points and configure rules based on contract types.  This intelligent contract management software functionality is helpful because data is consolidated and easily digestible, allowing users to set rules regarding locations, dates, monetary values, personally identifiable information (PII), payment card information (PCI), and other subsets of key data for a given contract.  Once configured, these processes are automated by contract intelligence – reducing the time wasted on tedious data import analysis so more time can be spent making data-driven decisions.

AI for Term, Clause, and Contract Data Extraction

AI-powered contract management software is a key player in data extraction functionality.  Data extraction tools can also be beneficial to organizations that manage legacy contracts.  If an organization has legacy agreements that need importing into contract management software but does not have a structured data spreadsheet with which to perform a bulk data import, said bulk data can be systematically extracted so that users do not have to manually key in individual fields.  Consequently, contract clauses, contract terms, and contract data input are streamlined – providing the visibility and ease-of-use necessary to search, report, compare, and classify contracts and legal risks.

Contract Artificial Intelligence Streamlines Contract Workflows

In the interest of minimizing wasted time and money resulting from inefficient contract workflows, contract administrators should take note of the time frame in which individual tasks are completed, as well as which tasks are causing delays and prolonging cycle times.  Reliable, AI-powered contract management software provides intelligent workflow automation that supports task performance monitoring.  Contract managers can identify the number of days it took employees to complete assigned tasks, promoting accountability.  From there, tasks can be quickly escalated to increase timeliness and keep the contract lifecycle moving.

In addition to ensuring task deadlines are met, contract management professionals armed with contract AI can easily keeps tabs on the number of days a given contract is sitting in each status or stage of the contract lifecycle.  Visibility can drastically increase with easy-to-understand visual representations of workflow analytics and reports.  Consequently, bottlenecks in the workflow process can be easily identified so inefficient contract lifecycle management practices can be eliminated.

With newfound insight into why their contracts are being delayed, contract managers can reassign roles, rotate task assignments, or escalate tasks –  evolving their contract lifecycle management practices accordingly.

More Accountability with AI-Based Contract Management

Proper risk management is crucial in successful contract management.  AI-powered contract management software makes risk analysis, risk assessment, and risk mitigation easy and efficient.  Contract Management AI encourages robust risk mitigation by allowing users to fully leverage the features and functionality made available to them by their contract management software (such as tracking of counterparties, workflows, employees, tasks, records, etc.).

A risk score can be provided to users based on their usage of available tools.  This feature holds contract management professionals accountable for how fastidiously they utilize tools to prevent risk.

For example, if Sally’s organization’s intelligent contract management software reveals to her that it is not putting enough time into tracking approval status, then the organization adjusts how it tracks approvals accordingly so that it is allocating the necessary effort to mitigate risks associated with counterparty activity.  When contract management AI solutions establish checks and balances, risk mitigation practices are improved, and risk is reduced – streamlining the risk prevention process and minimizing losses.

Contract Management and Risk Assessment

Contract management AI can provide further insight into contract risk with risk rating and mapping features.  Contract risk profile ratings allow contract managers to visualize risk variables.  Based on the tracking of risk, an AI-powered contract management software can provide a risk assessment matrix.

Not only can users see risk probability patterns for events within contracts, but they can also see the exposure that results from those contract risks.  Insight into possible detrimental consequences of an event with potential risk can help contract managers decide how to proceed with a given contract.  Visualizing the results of an action associated with risk inherently reduces risk and allows contract managers to move forward with risk management decisions quicker and more efficiently.

Artificial Intelligence in Contract Lifecycle Management

Contract management professionals need to make sure they are powered with the tools above so that they can prepare for better contract visibility and reduced risk.  As such they should leverage the only solution on the market that offers all of these tools and more: CobbleStone®.

CobbleStone Contract Insight^® is an advanced contract lifecycle management software backed by artificial intelligence that allows contract managers to manage, track, and draft contracts faster, and automate and streamline the entire contract lifecycle with flexible features such as contract authoring, workflow, version tracking, and so much more.

Discover why thousands of contract managers trust CobbleStone Software with their contract management needs.  To learn more about CobbleStone’s unparalleled contract management software, book a free demo with a Contract Insight expert today!

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Merlin Search Technologies today announced the release of Merlin Integrated Search (IS), a revolutionary new cloud-based software platform for investigations, discovery and compliance. Merlin IS is the first Search 2.0 platform, the first to offer keyword and algorithmic search in a user-friendly, integrated system. Drawing from the latest cutting edge search and machine-learning technology, the platform is purpose-built to make search smarter, review faster and discovery more affordable.

“Search 2.0 gives you the best of both worlds, the utility of simple keywords and the power of AI machine learning,” explained David Greetham, Founder of PC Forensics and former head of Ricoh’s E-Discovery Business Unit. “It represents a huge leap forward over keyword searching alone and will change the way the world searches large document populations forever,” he predicted.

Introducing Sherlock

Merlin IS is powered by Sherlock, the world’s first AI-driven digital document bloodhound and the backbone of Merlin’s Search 2.0 platform. In milliseconds, literally the blink of an eye, Sherlock can analyze the documents a user has seen, build a machine-learning model, apply it to the rest of the population and then return other highly-relevant documents to further the investigation. Simply put, Sherlock eliminates the need to craft complicated keyword searches, instead employing smart algorithms to fetch relevant documents faster, more easily, and at lower cost than traditional keyword search.

“Sherlock will revolutionize document search the way Pandora revolutionized how we find great music,” explained John Tredennick, Merlin’s CEO and founder. “Users simply click ‘Thumbs Up’ or ‘Thumbs Down’ and Sherlock does the rest, quickly surfacing additional relevant documents.”

“We built Sherlock to be fast and scalable–an order of magnitude faster than anything on the market,” explained Dr. William Webber, PhD,  Merlin’s Chief Data Scientist. “Sherlock can analyze selected documents, build a machine-learning model, apply it to a million documents,  and bring back more relevant documents in 100 milliseconds. That is faster than the blink of an eye. Sherlock  can do ten million documents in a second,” he explained.

Rave Reviews for Sherlock

Merlin IS is currently being used on a limited basis for several high-stakes regulatory matters as it transitions from beta. Initial reviews have been extremely positive:

“Using Sherlock in a high stakes regulatory matter, we learned more about our documents in a few days than in months with another vendor. Merlin Integrated Search is excellent – saving time for counsel and costs for clients. We can’t wait to do more with it!”

Dara Tarkowski, partner and founder of Actuate Law.

“I poked around using what I know are responsive docs and I put in a competitor name (not a party to the matter). I went into Sherlock and gave the thumbs up to a few documents and suddenly I saw highlighted terms that go straight to the heart of the matter. Sherlock knows what the case is about! What amazing magic is this? It’s almost spooky.”

Deborah Temkin, CA, CFE, Managing Member of Trace Forensic Experts, a national investigations firm.

Sherlock can be used for a wide range of search needs, going well beyond e-discovery. “A large team from a major healthcare provider has been using the beta version for many months,“ Tredennick explained. “They believe Sherlock will be a game changer for searching medical records along with medical research. We are also working with senior people from a government agency in Singapore that is interested in using Sherlock for major criminal and civil investigations.”

Awards

Although a recent startup, Merlin has already been named a winner or is short listed for several upcoming legal innovation awards sponsored by the American Bar Association or American Lawyer Media. The Merlin team will be introducing Sherlock at the ABA Techshow in Chicago and will be presenting at ALM Legalweek in New York in March. Tredennick will also be joined by David Greetham and Deborah Temkin for an Emerging Technology presentation during Legalweek on Friday, March 11, 2022.

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