Legal teams frequently re-evaluate their tech stack and service providers due to evolving needs. In 2025, it’s clear that there will be transformative change. AI is evolving quickly, and organizations seeking to drive value across the business are evaluating the next generation of technology, including contract lifecycle management tools—and contract intelligence in particular–for faster, deeper insights and proactive decision-making across the contract lifecycle.
Whether managing new contracts due to a merger, spotting opportunities for untapped revenue potential in legacy contracts, tracking obligations, renegotiating or terminating low-performing contracts, or simply seeking to automate contract management to free up valuable internal resources, any number of triggers may initiative a formal request for proposal.
When evaluating contract intelligence solutions, there are five capabilities that should be included in your evaluation process to ensure that future deployments of technology and services meet expectations.
1. AI Data Readiness
The contract data itself can limit the efficacy of contract intelligence tools. Contract data must be AI-ready for any system harnessing AI to be effective. Today, most contracts are in unstructured form due to the complexity and variability of legal language, clauses, and nuances that make it challenging for even the most sophisticated machines to accurately extract and interpret.
A severability clause, for example, could be written differently depending on the type of contract—an employment contract severability content and structure could use different language than a lease agreement or purchase agreement—which makes isolating key concepts difficult for a single contract, let alone thousands of contracts.
A key step in getting data AI-ready is to transform contracts from unstructured to structured data. Often, organizations outsource this work to experts experienced in extracting contract data and storing it in the correct locations, and in a consistent format, for software to easily analyze vast amounts of data without burdensome manual review. Examples include party names (Acme Corp and all pertinent variations of it), dates (September 2, 2024, or 9/2/24 or some other variation), auto-renew details, and custom contract intelligence fields for extracting key data points for relevant clauses.
2. Data Cleansing and Roll-Ups
Contract intelligence tools are not built to find gaps in data or enable users to identify where AI extractions may be incorrect. Pre-purchase, it’s important to ensure that organizations understand problematic scenarios around data quality and hygiene, and have a roadmap (and the qualified personnel) for this part of the process.
There are two key components: ensuring the correct data is extracted and stored in the correct locations and in a consistent format; and creating roll-ups/governing summaries, which are the data that govern the entirety of any relationship between the parties to a contract. This enables a user to track any contract amendments made over the course of the relationship at the top of the agreement without having to manually create those updates.
A good example of the complexities of MSAs and subsequent amendments and work order agreements, and how contract experts can identify and put the contracts in the right order to create an accurate summary, is described in this blog.
3. Custom-Built Contract Intelligence
The needs of each organization are unique, and custom-built repositories to house contracts guarantee accuracy with extractions, legal analysis, and proactive prompts for actions specific to the organization’s needs. When custom-built, organizations can search across a contract portfolio for specific positions, generate contract risk scores, and operationalize contract data for risk analysis, among other things.
The best contract intelligence systems are built on industry-leading contract data model that has thousands of structured contract positions, applied to new and legacy agreements. Once documents are ready, AI review is supplemented with expert human review.
Contract data models allow law departments to transform their contracts into actionable data; furthermore, that data can be stored in the contract management system of an organization’s choice, enhancing the platform’s effectiveness with customized AI insights.
4. Enterprise System Integration
Contract intelligence should not be viewed as a standalone niche solution for legal departments. Rather, they and other business leaders should understand opportunities to leverage contract insights across the organization. Once contract data is extracted and structured, organizations can integrate this data with other enterprise systems, empowering business line users to make better data-decision decisions.
Sales and business development, for example, can analyze contract terms to understand pricing trends, identify profitable deals, and optimize revenue streams. Procurement can use these insights to monitor supplier performance based on contract terms (e.g., delivery times) to identify and address potential issues, along with identifying cost-saving opportunities, such as volume discounts. And finance can benefit from contract intelligence for accurately recognizing revenue based on contract terms and performance obligations, predict future cash flows based on contract payment schedules, and ensure compliance with financial regulations and accounting standards.
5. Professional Services Expertise
Unlike technology-only vendors, a service provider that offers both technology and services can ensure optimal performance of a contract intelligence platform and support legal and business users at every phase.
Not only can professional services expertise manage and optimize the tool from pre-implementation through implementation and beyond, starting with collaborating with the organization to get the contract data AI ready to cleansing data to custom-building the tool based on unique organization requirements; experts can help integrate contract data into enterprise systems and provide data-driven insights to optimize contract value.
Buyers of contract intelligence solutions should be knowledgeable about trends and core capabilities prior to investing in the solution. Planning for complexities with the support of an expert partner can simplify and optimize the process.
Contact UnitedLex if you would like to learn more about our Contract Intelligence Repository.