Contracting Tech Center

Contracts are the lifeblood of every business. Contracting technology helps lawyers and business professionals automate the drafting and review of contracts. It also helps corporate legal departments manage, search and monitor contracts after they are signed. In recent years, the market for contracts technology has become red hot. Major investment firms have poured billions into the companies that are developing this tech, with at least one recently becoming a so-called unicorn, meaning it is valued at $1 billion or more. For buyers in this market — many of whom are in corporate legal departments — that means there is an abundance of riches in the products available to them. But that also makes the selection process that much more difficult, as buyers must sort through a glut of competing products and claims.

This Legal Tech Center organizes these products into the following categories:

Contract Database Management. Systems that create organized repositories for contract documents that facilitate shared access to relevant documents based on indexed terms and search functionalities, and that may include additional functionalities such as document assembly, approval and signature processing, obligation monitoring and notifications, and integration with CRMs.

Contract Automation and Drafting (Through Signature). These applications facilitate all or some of the steps in the contract-formation process, from document generation, review, redlining and approvals through signature, and may include clause management, document assembly, routing for approvals, counter-party collaboration portals, and e-signatures integrations.

Contract Lifecycle Management. These products provide a suite of applications that handle all or many of the processes involved in end-to-end contract management, from contract generation, drafting and approval workflows, to contract database management, to post-execution contract review, analysis and performance monitoring.

Contract Review and Analysis (Post Signature). These applications provide actionable information about contracts post-execution, from monitoring performance of obligations, producing notifications and alerts, and assessing compliance with organizational parameters, to generating data abstracts and analytics about contract content, and may include the ability to perform data extraction and analysis on large document sets.

Smart Contracts. Smart contracts tools for lawyers enable creation of self-executing and self-authenticated contracts and transactions via use of blockchain or other distributed ledger systems.