Contract information overload.
Contracting today is broken. Nearly all commercial relationships are governed by carefully negotiated agreements, but those agreements spend most of their lives hidden in document repositories or desk drawers, only to be analyzed at renewal or when something goes wrong.
Meanwhile large companies are signing dozens of new agreements daily, across various departments, full to the brim with bespoke language and non-standard terms. Without focused contract data management, tracking these contracts quickly becomes untenable.
- Contracts are often lost or aren’t stored where they’re supposed to be.
- When found, there are often multiple versions, and contents are locked in scanned PDFs.
- Contract families are often scattered, so you can’t find relevant amendments to confidently assess the current state of counterparty relationships.
- Most companies have no way to look across a portfolio of agreements, making it impossible to competently manage risk and identify profit opportunities.
Answering even basic contract questions in this environment can take hours or days – undermining the legal department’s credibility, causing delays, and costing millions in lost efficiency. Even in the best-case scenarios, you can advise on a single contract, but not across a population of them. Existing contract management approaches don’t solve this problem, focusing instead on document level storage and workflow. What you need is an accurate and up-to-date contract database.
That’s where Knowable comes in. We exist to liberate your contract data so that you can use that data how and when you need to.
See the forest. And the trees.
Large companies grapple with a bewildering ecosystem of contracts. Various departments or teams engage in commercial activity with customers, suppliers, partners, advisors, employees, etc., resulting in diverse agreements and terms. Whether you manage these streams with one or multiple contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools, or with none at all, Knowable centralizes and filters your executed agreements, converts them to accurate structured data, and delivers the data back into your CLM and other enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
Structured contract data enables Knowable to deliver our clients what we call “the portfolio-level view”. By turning your text-based clauses into data, Knowable enables you to answer questions such as:
- How many of our contracts have unlimited liability? How many of those with unlimited liability are we providing indemnification?
- Which standard positions are we struggling to achieve? Are there hot spots where we are deviating from our preferred positions?
- Where can we apply price accelerators in our customer contracts?
- Which of our customer contracts allow us to outsource or offshore to less expensive locations?
This view enables various functions within your enterprise to find, interpret and navigate contract data at scale, or drill down into individual contractual positions. For instance, the legal department needs to maintain policy controls, advise on aspects of particular agreements, support your CLM, etc. Meanwhile, your IT team may need the structured contract data for the data lake that feeds the company ERP, while Sales teams may need the data for customer intelligence or renewal management. Knowable helps you collect, clean, protect and structure your contracts so your entire organization has the contract data it needs, where, when and how they need it.
Going further than a CLM.
Contract lifecycle management tools are not designed to deliver structured contract data. Along with their workflow and authoring tools, most CLMs provide a document repository. These repositories store documents and sometimes contain extracted text, but don’t translate that text into position data, making it impossible to ask and answer questions about your entire body of contracts.
Knowable leads the market in data modeling, data conversion and data/policy governance—none of which are CLM capabilities, and each of which requires specialized investment and IP.
Data modeling – Knowable is the leader in data modeling for contract data. Our 8 years of experience with some of the world’s largest companies has enabled us to develop deep expertise and know-how to anticipate and prioritize enterprise data needs. We define data models and field values and can handle nested data, multivariate data and contingent data.
Data conversion—Our legal experts and unique machine-learning algorithms translate prose into positions with 98% legal-grade accuracy, delivering efficient and trustworthy structured data and contract family relationships.
Data and Policy governance—With our help, you can measure adherence to policies and playbooks, feed performance improvement loops and adjust data models as market and regulatory requirements evolve.
Contract data management is at the core of Knowable. We have translated more than 150 million clauses into data elements, at a current run rate of 25 million clauses per quarter. We develop a pick-list of structured data answers for hundreds of fields, supporting scores of legal concepts, by doing frequency distributions of tens of thousands agreements and incorporating continual learning and improvement. And we do it across more than 25 languages.
Quick Wins
Clients begin to leverage the value of contract data in ways driven by their specific business priorities. Some are motivated by external events, like M&A transactions or regulatory audits. Others are looking to find pockets of value buried in specific populations of customer or supplier contracts. And many are simply looking to achieve basic contract hygiene across their global contract corpus by building a golden source of contract data.
Regardless of the initial motivation, contract data delivers business value without endless implementation cycles, change management exercises, or multi-million dollar investments, yielding visible impact for users across the enterprise in weeks, not months.