With practically every legal professional now working from home (WFH), there is probably no better moment for legal departments to start saving time and money while looking for contracts and related documents. And there is no greater need than the transfer of legacy legal documents to a contract management system (CMS) – all with the help of a reliable vendor.
In recent blog posts, we discussed contract crisis management and proper WFH strategies for general counsels and contract managers during the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic. In the following post, we will go over the importance of contact abstraction and migration for legal teams – and how to go about both processes in your own legal department – especially during times of crisis.
BENEFITS OF CONTRACT ABSTRACTION AND MIGRATION
As a vital business function, contract management needs to be accessible – and even understandable – across an entire organization. Far too often, however, opportunities are missed, milestones are skipped over, and revenues are lost because of the poor management of contracts. That is why it is crucial that contracts are moved to more evolved management systems – those that are entirely cloud-based and powered by artificial intelligence. 
If you need to onboard legacy documents into a client-specific portal, there are two types of services offered by CMS vendors: contract abstraction and contract migration.
In essence, contract abstraction involves extracting pertinent dates, clauses, and other information from paper documents. This helps companies view essential details of contracts and make informed decisions about all of the contracts that are signed.
Typically, contract migration involves recovering the data that needs to be migrated and writing the data of a new contract. This increases companies’ overall productivity while ensuring legal compliance during contract lifecycle management (CLM).
CHOOSE THE RIGHT PARTNER FOR CONTRACT ABSTRACTION AND MIGRATION
At first blush, contract abstraction and migration may seem like a mammoth undertaking. But it should not be seen that way. Especially when you have your vendor’s contract abstraction-migration team right by your side.
This dedicated, expert team usually consists of personnel who have completed a law degree; have prior experience working in the legal process outsourcing industry; are seasoned in executing contract abstraction-migration services; and have a deep understanding of particular CMS applications, which all enable them to advise clients on best practices.
Basically, these legal professionals will carefully review legal documents and perform a rather robust quality assurance process. This will help you to extract highly-accurate, end-to-end data. More specifically, they will help you to do the following: contract abstraction” extracting pertinent dates, clauses, and information from documents.
- Find metadata information – they will abstract important information from legacy contract(s), including parties, dates, and key obligations. (This is applicable under contract abstraction services)
- Create a template map. They will prepare an application-specific template to upload contracts, with relevant information, onto the system, before mapping each entry in the template with relevant contract file
- Migrate existing data – they will move existing metadata information and files from the legacy system into an application
- Determine contract relationships – they will link supplemental contract records to main records using a flowchart map for visual representation
- Identify support documents – they will map-related documents, such as a draft version of contract(s) and email correspondence files, etc. (This is under the Document tab of contract records for easy future reference)
- Analyze data sets – they will identify and structure amendments to be in line with the application workflow cycle
GET STARTED TODAY
As cloud-based, AI-powered CLM software, ContractPodAi supports legal teams with the management, negotiation, and administration of contracts with customers, partners, and suppliers. With ContractPodAi, existing agreements – along with extracted metadata information – can be migrated into the software for future tracking and reporting.
Download our Contract Migration Services Datasheet today, and find out how ContractPodAi can help you become more proactive about your contract abstraction and migration.
Author:
Kumud Bika
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