Contract Management and Contract Data Review - Digital Toolkit

How to Activate a Signed Contract (Passive) Database?

We are launching a blogpost series to showcase the contract management and contract data review capabilities of our legal innovation ecosystem. As part of the series, we will demonstrate how our partner platform Aivan.AI responds to certain common issues business teams face in the post-signing phase of contracting. In step 1, we will address one of the most obvious flaws in contract management: once signing occurred, contracts often become passive documents. In this post, we share some valuable insights as to how Aivan.AI helps activate contract databases.

But first, let’s consider the typical process that happens to documents immediately after signing. Most probably they are saved in some shared folder, perhaps a printed copy is placed in some binder in the office cabinet. In the very best case, the new contract might even be stored in some document management or CRM system. Archiving a contract, however, does not mean that the process is complete. There are often important dates, actions and scenarios in the future directly related to the contract that must be acknowledged by the contract owner in order to efficiently manage potential legal and business risks relating to the contract content.

As long as an organization’s contracts are lying in a shared folder or just as printed copies in some filing cabinet, the contract management process remains reactive instead of proactively serving the business goals of the corporation. Irrespective of the document management or CRM system put in place, a reactive contract management function will not be able to adequately prevent and deal with risk scenarios in good time.

Looking to activate your contract database?

With the right technology at hand, contract management and efficient data review is less of a daunting task for the legal and business teams. Here are five key actions users can take to proactively manage the contract database with Aivan.AI:
#1 Specify activities and reminders linked to contract data

In Aivan.AI, each contract can have an unlimited number of activities with e-mail reminders attached to them. Activity may be about right and/or obligations included in the contract, price check points, termination, renewal – pretty much anything. Users can select different recipients for each activity and a reminder e-mail will be sent on the date specified in the activity tab to the person(s) set by the user. One may also edit the message for the reminder directly on the platform.

#2 Quickly overview basic contract data with the contract card functionality

Users can choose to view their electronic signed agreement database as a set of binders or contracts. In the ‘Contracts’ view, the Aivan.AI platform highlights certain key information on each contract card, as follows:

    • Number of users who can see the given contract in the Aivan.AI platform
    • Owner of the contract
    • Counterparty (if several, the first one is shown here)
    • Number of files attached to the contract
    • Date when the contract was uploaded to Aivan.AI
#3 Add internal notes to your contracts (included in the platform search engine)

Users may add several electronic notes to each contract to highlight and keep track of key information internally. Even better, notes can be anchored to a specific place in any contract file, so clicking on the note will take users directly to the section of the document that one wanted to highlight for the team.

#4 Manage access rights and check the audit log of your contracts 

Aivan.AI enables corporations to set access rights of team members according to four user categories: administrator, contract owner, editor and viewer. While not all users can check the audit trail, contract owners and administrators may see a full audit log for the contracts. The audit log will show the list of users who have viewed or edited the contract and also the latest actions taken by each user with access right to a given contract. Audit logs can be downloaded and also filtered by activity type or user.

#5 Make the most of smart filters and intelligent search functionalities

Aivan.AI has a powerful search engine and various filters embedded in the platform. Full contract text (including all appendixes) is indexed for the intelligent free text search. Given the AI-based functionalities, the platform returns more relevant search results that go beyond the traditional keyword identification.

Users may use both filters and free text search to limit search results. The content of the advanced filters will depend on the metadata set in an organization’s own Aivan.ai account. However, there are some prebuilt filters that users can launch immediately upon starting to use the Aivan.AI platform. For example:

    • contracts that end within a month
    • contracts uploaded in the last month
    • ended contracts
    • contracts with and without attachment
    • contracts with activities specified by the user (see action item #1 above)

Further, Aivan.AI includes certain basic filters regarding contract status, effective date, end date, upload date, contracting party, tags and contract owner. Finally, the advanced filters will reveal the binder in which a contract is based, the main document language, number of attachments, number of pages in the main document and the number of activities attached to a given contract.

For more insights and know-how regarding the Aivan.AI platform, take a look at the video below. Or reach out to us if  you are curious about a full demo of the platform.

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