“AI TECHNOLOGY allows MIA Contract Lawyers, a boutique NewLaw commercial practice, based in the heart of Melbourne’s café culture, in Lygon Street, Carlton, to compete for the same large corporate client-base as traditional BigLaw firms, not only here in Melbourne, but throughout the country and overseas,” says Martin Algie, founding principal and winner of the 2019 International Client Choice Award for Projects and Procurement (Australia).

The benefits of managing contracts using AI technology

Many medium-to-large companies pull out contracts out only when an issue arises; otherwise, these stay in the proverbial “bottom drawer”. Mr Algie says that “these companies are losing money unnecessarily”. The International Association for Contract & Commercial Management (IACCM), the global peak body for contract management, suggests that this costs on average 10 per cent of the value in contracts. It is considerably more in certain industries. These losses come from passing up opportunities - to get lower prices, to get out of underperforming contracts, to pass on cost increases and many other opportunities that cannot be exploited once lost. This was a shocking discovery for Mr. Algie, who says that it was a key driver to him developing ContractControl^TM.

Properly managing contracts addresses this “value leakage”. Fundamental to all contract management is identifying these opportunities. Properly managing contracts can have great efficiency dividends, producing a further source of value. It saves stakeholders time searching for relevant contracts and distilling information. It also saves corporate counsel hours of wasted effort, assisting those stakeholders, allowing both parties to spend more time on high value-added work.

But this might be said of all other contract lifecycle management systems. ContractControl^TM has two important, AI-provided advantages; indeed advantages that adds value for both large and small businesses without the need for stakeholders to have any technical expertise. Together with MIA Contract Lawyers’ senior lawyers, the company will identify the rights and obligations to be tracked and managed.

ContractControl^TM can take large repositories of legacy contracts, process them using the AI ThoughtRiver engine and extract data on critical rights and obligations. This information can then be displayed for stakeholders on a dedicated, readily accessible page. Periodic alerts can also be sent out to ensure that stakeholders never miss a deadline and that counterparties remain compliant. This feature makes AI-based contract management particularly valuable for companies in industries characterised by long-term contracts.

The second fundamental value-add produced by artificial intelligence is the ability to reconfigure the system and apply that to the entire uploaded contract repository. This ability makes ContractControl^TM an option for small but growing businesses currently with few contracts. A company can start small, initially managing only the fundamentals, making it most cost effective. ContractControl^TM can be reconfigured later, when more intensive management is needed. Once the contracts are reprocessed using the new settings, stakeholders gain immediate access to the additional information and alerts on it.

Addressing challenges in change management

MIA Contract Lawyers has spent a great deal of time surveying clients around this issue. A point consistently raised in that research and in the industry press on LegalTech is: what if those corporate stakeholders are not on-board with the tool and the technology? MIA Contract Lawyers has responded to this change management challenge.

MIA Contract Lawyers will take on the management of a company’s contracts, largely relieving stakeholders of the burden. Mr Algie gives a simple example of this value-added service, saying  “using ContractControl^TM, our contract managers will be aware of when reports are due from a counterparty; in the days and weeks leading up to that deadline, we can send out reminders and, ultimately, if they fail to provide the reports, we will make sure the reports are produced and provided, naturally, at each step, with the instructions of the client”.

The ContractControl™ Story

ContractControl_ is the result of MIA Contract Lawyers partnering with leading technology companies, ThoughtRiver from Britain and Wolters Kluwer from the Netherlands. They have worked together over the last year to allow MIA Contract Lawyers to now launch ContractControl^TM. Mr Algie explains that “the solution lay in not over-complicating the system”.

Visit the ContractControl http://www.miacontractlawyers.com.au/contractcontrol to see how it works and use cases.