Deal contracts digitization for the world’s leading independent financial advisory and asset management firm.
About the Client
The client is the world’s largest independent investment bank, with principal executive offices in New York City, Paris and London. It is a financial advisory and asset management firm that engages in investment banking, asset management, and other financial services primarily with institutional clients.
Business Need
Our client implemented a deals contract management platform and needed to populate the platform with information and metadata from its existing contracts. Doing this manually would require its legal team to review each contract, identify the relevant information and metadata, and enter that data into the platform. There had to be an easier – and cheaper – way.
Challenges and Requirements
- Enable forensic accounting of deal contracts.
- Eliminate human error & misses causing millions of dollar penalties to the firm.
- Eliminate manual effort to rectify the errors.
- Automate the manual audit process which needed several hours of lawyers & legal advisers.
- Automate the manual effort to analyze the contract and reduce delay in response to regulatory requirements.
- Unavailability of the information due to silo-ed approach.
- No visibility to the contract terms, legal clauses, values, commitments.
- Hard to understand the legal terms hence no visibility to impact in case of non-compliance.
Our Role
Using a combination of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning techniques, we designed and automated the contract digitization process, including the extraction of key terms and clauses from the client’s deal contracts. The solution was as individual as the client – we trained the machine to understand the client’s terms and provisions, and created a custom review workflow specifically designed for its deal contracts. We monitored the machine learning carefully to make sure that the outputs were of high quality and would deliver valuable insight from deal contract analysis in the future, including forensic accounting. The use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to import the extracted deal contract information from our AI solution to the contracts management platform meant that the legal team were freed up to focus on value-adding activities.
Technologies
Java, Spring Framework, Hibernate ORM, MySQL, Hadoop, Hadoop HDFS, Apache Hive, Apache ZooKeeper, Apache Spark, and Stanford NLP.
Benefits
Benefits to the client includes:
- The client’s deal contract review speed increased 30-fold, at an eighth of its previous costs.
- As well as these immediate efficiencies, the client’s contract performance analytics improved across all territories; the fully searchable database of terms bringing the opportunity for far greater insights and improved decision-making.
- Forensic accounting of deal contracts was made possible, with streamlined and automated workflow.