Pilot 1. Compliance Assurance Services for Contracts

Motivation

Contracts are a core element in legal and regulatory compliance.

Currently, companies have to manage big amounts of contracts from diverse nature and purpose, and for most of them this is a time-consuming manual process. SMEs do not count on management systems to help them in identifying the core data and the main actions enforced by the contract. Only a minimal amount of information is keep in a spreadsheet (title, parties, date of signature), which is not enough to effectively manage these contracts and keep track of the actions that need to be taken by the company (such as renewal or amendments).

To ensure compliance, improve governance and mitigate risks, companies need to rely on systems that support them in digitalising contrats, identifying the core data, providing an overview of the main content, pointing to the relevant legislation in force, and notifying when actions need to be taken.

Objectives and proposed solution

openlaws currently provides a regulatory compliance solution. Part of this solution is a basic module for contract management.
The objective of this business case is to enhance contract compliance through automation, thus reducing costs, corporate risks and personal risks. The prototype created in Lynx will actively extract information from these contracts and monitor and analyse these documents against the:

• Public regulatory framework (including legislation and case law from the EU and Member States, public provisions and suggestions by authorities, etc.)
• Private contracts

The system will actively inform companies, persons in charge (directors, managers, data protection officers, etc.) or the company’s lawyer(s) about whenever there is a change in relevant legislation, case law, or in contractual obligations that affects a company’s obligations, even across different jurisdictions and languages.

In addition, Lynx will support interlinking between these legal texts (see Linking Service). Also, the system will be able to identify (standard) clauses in general contracts.
In order to reach this objective, Lynx will (i) create an initial knowledge base around contracts by manually and automatically collecting possibly relevant documents; (ii) provide surveying algorithms to automatically enlarge the knowledge base with new relevant documents from sources like Eur-Lex, BOE, etc.; (iii) provide algorithms using interlinked terminologies to automatically link the knowledge base documents to other documents within or outside the knowledge base; a legal knowledge graph will be built as result of this activity; (iv) offer a web interface to search, browse and comment the documents in the legal knowledge graph. Lynx will feed into the existing openlaws.com platform, operated by openlaws.

The platform to be developed will differ from existing legal document repositories in several aspects: (i) the comprehensive collection of relevant documents; (ii) the inter­linking of legislation, case law, public documents and private contracts, and policies; (iii) the inclusion of references relevant to multiple jurisdictions (EU, AT, DE, ES, IT) and languages.