When discussing Clearlaw’s products with clients and prospects, our company often discusses the obvious value propositions of our product lines. Those include increasing the speed of contractual reviews, faster turnaround times for sales, finding legal content across contracts, and lowering legal costs. However, Clearlaw’s experiences with our clients have shown that contracts are also data rich assets to be leveraged, resulting in new business opportunities.
In the professional services and software spaces, contracts can go on for many years. A three-year software license or managed service agreement is far from uncommon. As that relationship progresses, the original people involved can move on or get promoted. This results in a brain drain of the contractual knowledge, impacting the client relationship.
A recent Clearlaw client is a good example. They were having trouble enforcing specific contractual clauses with clients, especially auto renewal clauses, automatic price increases with said renewal, price increase notification requirements, and late payment penalties. While this data was in the individual contracts, business resources struggled to easily access these data points. The organization had a variety of contract types and license frameworks, the result of multiple acquisitions and changes in their business model. As these clauses were often negotiated with a client during the initial sale, there was significant variability within each contract. The process was so cumbersome, that the organization often missed the notification deadline for price increases, resulting in a multi-million dollar missed opportunity.
Despite different contract types and frameworks being used over the years, Clearlaw’s NLP technology can read and extract this information from thousands of contracts, organizing this information into structured data. This is what we call "Contract Intelligence."
Furthermore, our API feature, Clearlaw Connect, allows us to export data to external systems. When Clearlaw exports this data to one’s CRM, such as Salesforce, sales and customer support employees are instead provided this data at their fingertips, without having to read through entire contracts. This further empowers the business by leveraging the CRM’s features, such as automating price increase notification emails. Through this automation, the business no longer misses the notification deadline and generates additional revenue, no human intervention required.
This is one of hundreds of use cases Clearlaw can help with. By providing our clients with Contract Intelligence, we digitally transform static assets into business accelerators.