Contract analysis: Difference between revisions

But it turns out parsing text lovingly confected in the brow of some unknown legal eagle isn’t as easy as all that. Just boring syntactical things like handling plurals and irregular verbs is extremely hard to code. And while in time the machine will get better at that, the universe of possible ways of articulating an idea is infinite and, while most legal eagles suffer from a form of locked-in syndrome which inhibits access to large parts of their imaginations when it comes to exercising their talent for textual complexity and saying things which, for the avoidance of doubt, are not in doubt, it is an information superhighway. Parsing the fevered prose of a human lawyer will always need some kind of a human sense check. So, the contract review tools build in exactly that kind of sense-check function. They hire paralegals, in low-cost jurisdictions, to check the output before sending it back. This has two unfortunate consequences:

*'''It is slow''': Firstly, it slows down the output: Instead of getting your markup instantaneously, you get it three quarters of an hour or more later. This is more than enough time for the modern eagle to have been comprehensively distracted by something else, and in any case ''it is longer than it would have taken to review and fix the contract in the first place.''

*'''It is more expensive''': Secondly, it adds to the cost. Now, to be sure, [[reg tech]] providers are past masters at rent-seeking anyway, but here they have an actual out-of-pocket cost. Thus, the contract review tool will carry a heavy charge per document review. Better ones charge less than a hundred bucks. Some charge as much as three hundred, per review. Suddenly that cost proposition looks a bit squiffy: Your starting assumption is you are saving an hour of your internal legal’s time, which you unitise at say $250. But that is a nominal cost. Internal legal eagles are a fixed cost. They sit there, accruing expense, ''whether you use them or not''. Most work hard, of course — it is a rare legalo eagle that punches out at 5pm on the smacker ''any'' day, let alone ''every'' day. That extra [[confi]] will get looked at during the day, at some point, anyway. Actually, reviewing confis can be a pleasant distraction: a nice par three recharger after a hard morning slogging up a series of long fairways on regulatory change stakeholder calls. (Management team: why don’t you try to get rid of all the stakeholder management calls?) So unless you can prove that, with your [[contract review tool]] you can actually let some of your lawyers ''go'', it is not saving ''any'' money. It is ''costing'' money — ''more'' than it would have cost your internal team just knock off the confi in the first place.