By Hal Marcus, Esq., VP Product Marketing, Evisort

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The transformative power of artificial intelligence (AI) in contract management becomes clear when you consider how organizations are using it to accomplish tasks that were undreamt-of just a few years ago. 

In the example below — shared with the legal operations community during our joint session “Analytics to Action: Unlocking Contract Data to Accelerate the Speed of Business” at CLOC Global Institute 2024 — NetApp leveraged the capabilities of several partners to solve a pressing contract management challenge. One of them was Evisort and our AI-native Contract Intelligence Platform.

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The challenge: Escaping a tidal wave of manual reviews

The story begins with the relocation of NetApp’s international headquarters from the Netherlands to Ireland. Since NetApp is a global leader in providing services for managing and sharing data, both on-premise and in the cloud, this would be anything but simple.

The fact the company was moving across both the North and Irish Seas was nearly symbolic, as the move would have inundated NetApp’s legal department with a rogue wave of manual reviews. It would require them to inspect approximately 90,000 contracts covering hundreds of NetApp entities, to identify any agreements linked to the Amsterdam location that contained assignment clauses, and then determine what those clauses required. 

As Shelle Elzer, Legal Operations Manager for NetApp, understatedly phrased it at our CLOC session, “as you can imagine, 90,000 contracts is a pretty big data set to have to go through.” 

Given the sheer volume and the need for accuracy, a traditional manual review process was plainly out of the question. Meeting the challenge led NetApp to rely on legal intelligence systems consultant Harbor Labs, legal workflow automation provider Mitratech, and Evisort to collaborate in solving it.

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Contract AI leads the way

This is why Evisort’s Contract Intelligence Platform was brought to bear, with AI-native capabilities including:

• High-speed ingestion: Scalably processing up to 450,000 contracts daily.
• Advanced OCR: Handling handwritten documents, bad scans, and various file formats.
• Table extraction: Accurately extracting data from increasingly prevalent data tables within contracts.
• Multilingual support: Recognizing over 150 languages.
• Core term extraction: Identifying and extracting key legal terms, dates, and entities across agreements.‍
• Customization: Allowing users to define and extract specific terms relevant to their needs.

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Accelerating processes and saving millions with AI

Each phase of the project highlighted the value of AI-powered contract processing:

Contract review and data extraction

• The Evisort Contract Intelligence Platform rapidly ingested, reviewed and extracted crucial data from the 90,000 contracts.
• This eliminated the need for a large team of manual reviewers, saving significant time and resources.

Seamless integration with other systems

• The extracted data was integrated with the company's existing contract lifecycle management (CLM) system.
• This data was used by automated workflows for further action on the identified contracts.
• Processed contracts were returned to the designated repositories within the CLM system, completing the data cycle.

Completion and results

• The project tallied a cost savings of $2.5 million – an 82% savings over traditional methods.

Just as importantly, NetApp’s legal operations team saved a huge amount of time while giving them a new level of agility thanks to the speed and accuracy of the process, as well the  insights NetApp can now leverage moving forward.

Those insights proved useful as additional contract management needs arose over time, including the remediation of data processing agreements, further M&A activity, and the creation of a new corporate identity for a line of business. 

As Shelle Elzer put it, when a legal ops team is presented with a challenge, “You have to react, and have to react quickly; if you're putting your eyes on paper, you're not.”

The promise of generative contract AI 

The CLOC session also provided an opportunity to look ahead at potential future use of generative AI to analyze highly specific, non-standard contract information. We discussed Evisort’s Document X-Ray™, a groundbreaking capability that leverages generative AI for:

• Question-based model training: With Document X-Ray, users can ask questions about their contracts in simple natural language, and Evisort converts those questions to custom AI models. 
• Granular analysis: Going far deeper than clause-level analysis, Document X-Ray can extract specific terms, numbers, entities, dates, and more – even from data in tables. 

Not just extraction, generation: Document X-Ray can generate useful data points even beyond what expressly appears in the four corners of the contract — calculating dates and dollar amounts, summarizing terms in clear language, even automatically assigning rankings from a pulldown list so data points can be expressed in custom dashboards.

Collaboration is key: Unifying the ecosystem

NetApp’s success story also emphasizes the importance of collaboration among customers, providers, and platforms. Harbor Labs provided expert consultation on project design and implementation, Evisort supplied our AI-native platform, and Mitratech’s TAP workflow automation solution connected surfaced contract data and insights to legal ops processes. 

This foretells the future of legal operations: A connected ecosystem where legal operations professionals, procurement leaders, sales teams, and other business units can align with technology providers and external counsel to work together more efficiently — with all the necessary data for decision making at their fingertips.

Traditional contract management methods can’t keep pace with the accelerating speed of business. NetApp’s highly successful project exemplifies how AI-powered solutions and collaborative thinking are the keys to navigating this ever-evolving landscape.