Features

Now that we’ve covered the many use cases and key evaluation questions, let’s get into useful features of Embeddable Contracts AI solutions. Note that the features of Embeddable Contracts AIs are a subset of Contracts AI software features. For example, a contract management system might have an approval workflow or include e-signature capability. While useful features, these wouldn’t be driven by Embeddable Contracts AI. When we were at Kira Systems (our previous business) much of our roadmap was non-AI features. And even “AI” features typically involve some AI and a whole lot of UI work. An Embeddable Contracts AI vendor can sometimes offer helpful feedback on how to implement an AI feature, but often builders of end systems incorporating Embeddable Contracts AI do this work themselves. This makes sense, in that the end product vendor is the expert on their application, customers, and workflow.

In this piece, we’ll outline a full spectrum of features that we see as potentially useful in Embeddable Contracts AI. Two important notes:

  • As of the time of writing this piece, our belief is that some of the features mentioned here are not yet available in any Embeddable Contracts AI system. We are laying them out here in an effort to be comprehensive and forthright. That is, even though you can’t (yet!) get all these features from us, they are ones that might someday be useful. We are working hard to continue enhancing our product, and ideally many or all of these features will eventually become available in Zuva API (and other vendors’ products too).
  • While having lots of features can be important, it can be even more key that a given system has the features you need most, and that they are well built. Since Embeddable Contract AI solutions tend not to be user-facing, it won’t hurt customer workflow if you implement multiple AI solutions under the hood. So, potentially, you can get multiple features from one vendor, others from another vendor, and build others yourself.

With that, let’s get to features!

Classification and Extraction

Contracts are generally in the form of mostly unstructured text. The core function of an Embeddable Contracts AI is converting that unstructured text into semi-structured (e.g., provisions) or structured (e.g., entities, normalized values, “answers”) data. Other Contracts AI features derive from this core. Let’s walk through some different types of data produced. Provision Extraction Provision extraction is the AI finding clauses in a contract, e.g., an agreement’s term, termination, indemnification, exclusivity, tenant’s right to sublet, or default for cross default clause.

Clustering

Clustering is the grouping of related information together. In general, contract information tends to be grouped along two attributes: Provision-level clustering. Document clustering. Provision-level Clustering In provision-level clustering, similar provisions are grouped together. So, for example, clustering might enable an end user to see change of control clauses in other documents similar to one they had just reviewed. Grouping similar provisions together can be a useful feature because it:

Defined Term Detection

In a contract, defined terms are words given a specific meaning. E.g., “Start Date” means September 1, 2019. “Usage Data” means information reflecting the access or use of the Services by or on behalf of Customer or any User, provided that for clarity Usage Data shall not include any Customer Data or any information that identifies, or reasonably would permit identification of Customer Data. Defined term detection is tech that finds defined terms in contracts.

Document Comparison

Document comparison shows differences between one document and another (or others, in the case of multiple document comparison). This can otherwise be known as redlining and blacklining. Think track changes, but (potentially) in situations where track changes wouldn’t work, like where one or more documents are not a Word document (e.g., a PDF or image file), or where you need to compare multiple documents against one base document. Document comparison is useful in multiple situations:

Related Document Linking

Contracts are frequently part of a family of agreements: a base agreement; amendments to it; renewals; sub-agreements; as well as schedules, addendums, and statements of work under it. At Kira Systems, we had one customer contract family that I suspect was 25 documents. Contract AI users can be well served by seeing all these documents together. Related document linking (aka related document grouping) attempts to automatically identify documents that are part of the same family.

Risk Scoring

Contract risk scoring assigns a risk grade to agreements (or clauses), based on some predetermined view of what constitutes contract risk. Risk definitions could be determined by a vendor, or they could be custom for an individual organization deploying the technology. Certain clauses - or wordings of clauses - have the potential to be high risk. These include: Restrictive covenants - exclusivity, non-competition, and (less so) non-solicitation. Indemnification. Most favored customer treatment.

Signature Detection and Recognition

Signature (and Other Handwritten Information) Detection and Recognition Signature detection helps determine whether a document has been signed. A related feature identifies whether pages have any handwritten information on them. Recognition refers to actually converting that handwritten information to text (i.e., analogous to OCR on printed text). Signature detection is useful because: Often there can be many draft versions of an agreement floating around, and the signed version will be the one that matters.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Many contracts come in the form of image files - i.e., they are scanned documents. In order to review them, the images need to be converted into (correctly laid out) text. This is where Optical Character Recognition (OCR) comes in. OCR converts images into text. So you can upload a contract (or other document) in the form of an image file into the Embeddable Contracts AI application you’re using, and OCR will convert that file into text, which the Embeddable Contracts AI can process further (e.