In today’s fast-paced business environment, legal and compliance teams are under increasing pressure to manage contracts efficiently, ensure compliance, and mitigate risk — all while staying within budget. Traditional methods of contract abstraction and management are often too time-consuming, error-prone, or cost-prohibitive. Fortunately, automation is transforming the way companies handle contracts, making both contract management and contract abstraction faster, more affordable, and more accurate.
Automated Contract Abstraction: Quick and Cost-Effective
Contract abstraction is a process that is typically too time-consuming for internal resources and too cost‐prohibitive to outsource. Many companies that do outsource abstraction face projects costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. Plus, even when outsourced, the planning, training, oversight, and checking of results still require a great deal of your staff’s time.
Through automated contract abstraction, organizations are overcoming these challenges and accessing essential information from contracts quickly and affordably, and seamlessly integrating this information into their contract management systems and databases.
You can use automated contract data abstraction for:
Contract Administration – Keep your existing contract management system up-to-date. Abstract any number of provisions quickly and accurately and bring them into your existing management tool(s).
Conflict Check – Rapidly conduct conflict checks on new contracts, ensuring compliance and completing deals faster.
Business Intelligence – Gain access to all contract data, giving GCs and senior managers strategic insights into overall legal obligations, risks, and opportunities.
Put Brightleaf automated contract abstraction to work for you –
Brightleaf Solutions, a Boston‐based company, has solved the problems of contract abstraction through its automated abstraction service and skilled professionals. Corporate legal, contract, and procurement departments use the Brightleaf Solutions service to:
Abstract essential information from their contracts accurately, quickly, and affordably
Upload abstracted data easily into their contract management systems
Drastically cut the time and costs to perform abstractions
How to Automate Contract Management?
Automating contract management typically starts with organizing and digitizing your existing contracts. A critical step in this process is contract data abstraction, especially when you’re migrating data into a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system or implementing a new one.
Through automated abstraction, key metadata and clauses — such as party names, expiration dates, renewal terms, and obligations — are extracted at scale and uploaded into the CLM platform. This enables your system to trigger alerts, run compliance checks, and offer visibility across the contract lifecycle, right from day one.
Without abstraction, you’re simply moving PDFs into a repository. With it, you’re activating the true potential of your CLM tool.
The Goal of Automated Contract Management
The ultimate goal of automating the contract management process is to lessen the business and reputational risks of corporations by ensuring they comply with the terms and conditions of every contract. Most importantly, automated contract management enables corporations to foresee their rights and obligations, and thus prevents future litigation and its cost.
Advantages of Automated Contract Management
Puts pertinent information right at your fingertips.
Provides a succinct view of all significant points such as date, party name, expiration, renewal, and more.
Saves time, cost, and resources, thereby increasing internal productivity and ensuring legal compliance across the entire contract lifecycle.
Helps companies make informed decisions about the contracts they sign and the importance of a legal document comes to light.
Overcomes threats associated with non-compliance such as loss of reputation, cancellation of license, loss of customers, penalties, fines, and withdrawal of fiscal benefits.
By combining the power of automated contract abstraction and automated contract management, organizations can manage their contract lifecycle more effectively, reduce legal and compliance risks, and unlock critical insights from their data — all while cutting down on costs and manual effort.