18 Jun

From Days to Minutes: Reimagining Contract Review in Financial Services with AI

DI
Danny Ivatt

Contract review is a time-consuming yet critical function for every financial services organisation.

This manual checking of documents requires thousands of working hours, costing businesses valuable resources in a highly competitive marketplace where speed is paramount.

New deals and partnerships need the right oversight so businesses can operate with all of the essential risk controls in place. But this lengthy process heightens the risk of losing business.

Skip this integral step and you’re leaving yourself open to litigation and regulatory fines.

With the stakes so high, it’s no surprise that many financial organisations are already exploring how AI can offer support, with the use of AI assistants for legal teams becoming more commonplace.

But the majority of these AI solutions are focused on tasks such as information retrieval. Instead, they should address the critical activity of understanding what standards and terms must be present. Legal teams need to know what to ask, not just have access to better information. 

Rather than just enhancing existing processes, organisations can take the opportunity to rethink them, removing manual work rather than just enhancing it. Making those processes intelligent. 

Integrating Expert Knowledge

The labour intensive nature of contract review means the majority of businesses are unable to scale their legal function to meet demand without adding to headcount or relying on third parties. 

With manual review often taking hours or longer – for just a single document – organisations are investigating AI-based solutions to help with workflow management.

But implementing technology solutions can be difficult due to the need to provide expert input to configure them, with the process of creating the standards and canonical questions for each contract type in itself creating potentially months’ or years’ worth of work.

AI-generated Standards with Transparency

Our approach and AI solution bootstraps the process of contract analysis for financial organisations.

Rather than just focusing on smart assisting the legal team with better information retrieval, this solution reimagines the entire process by:

  • Creating the standards that must be applied to each new document 
  • Using AI as a ‘covert’ element of a reimagined process, orchestrating workflows and removing manual elements
  • Focusing the legal team in the areas where they have expertise

Agentic workflows are gaining increasing traction in enterprise due to their ability to automate the 'un-automatable.' In our approach, AI Agents are defined and orchestrated as ‘experts’ in a specific area of contract law or commercial finance.

These AI ‘experts’ take on the role of a Head of Legal Services, creating the standards against which new contracts must be judged, as well as directing and triaging work.

This solution enables a comprehensive triage system and workflow, ensuring contract adherence to AI generated standards before they are passed for manual review.

As part of the process both front office and legal teams get access to a transparent backlog and workflow.

Contract Review with Agility: From Days to Minutes 

AI can reduce the time taken for individual contract review from days of work to just minutes.

When we tested this recently at a global commercial bank, we found it will lead to a reduction in manual contract review by 90% and allow teams within the business to focus on areas that require expertise rather than administration.

Whereas commonly available AI products for legal teams supplement existing manual processes, we focus on applying AI to reimagine whole processes and solve the problems that inhibit efficiency.

Our approach seeks to understand the core problem that limits automation and can slow the processing speed of documents within the organisation.

New contract types can be added to the system in hours using AI-generated standards, compared to traditional approaches to create automated workflows that can take months to configure and implement.

This is achieved by using AI to understand what standards and terms must be present in contracts and alleviating the tactical burden. 

Taking the First Steps

We like to start by getting an understanding of an organisation’s end-to-end processes - this provides a true picture of the individuals and teams that need to be involved in the project.

It’s also critical at this stage to determine departmental performance, SLAs and organisational strategic objectives. In doing this, we create a strong thread that runs right from the top of the business down into every feature that is being delivered to production.

We’re thinking beyond simply making it easy to ‘chat’ with documents. We’re allowing enterprises to harness Generative AI to solve problems without developing complex traditional software.

This makes it easier to drive tangible value from AI aligned to the overall goals of the business.

By reimagining a business process, making that process intelligent we’re alleviating the burden and satisfying the demand for contract review, thereby allowing businesses to establish essential risk controls in a timely manner.

Your business could be next.

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