Many professionals who have worked with contracts have faced this critical question: Where are all of our contracts, and what's actually in them?

For every organization, particularly those of significant size or age, this isn't a trivial question. It represents a fundamental risk. Every employment agreement, partnership arrangement, vendor relationship, and supplier agreement represents a legal obligation. And for many companies, the honest answer to where, precisely, these obligations are documented is that they’re not entirely sure.

12 months centralizing contracts — and not all of them could be found

Recently, a general counsel shared with us the experience of trying to centralize their organization's contracts. After a long, hard 12 months, they discovered contracts were scattered across nine different locations including individual employee hard drives. The risks represented by this were incalculable. If an employee’s hard drive crashed, that business relationship could be lost forever. And the 12 month effort wasn’t successful. Even after that investment of time and resources, they weren't confident they'd found everything.

This scenario is more common than it should be. Contracts are processed by different business units, stored where they're worked on, and filed in whatever system seems convenient at the time. Even when companies implement contract lifecycle management tools, their effectiveness depends entirely on consistent metadata tagging, which is a manual process that's both time-consuming and vulnerable to human error.

The risks of missing contracts are real

The risks become particularly critical during litigation or regulatory inquiries, when legal teams need immediate access to every relevant agreement. We’ve spoken with legal teams who face regular litigation and understand they must be able to surface all contracts with specific counterparties on short notice. Many organizations aren't this prepared.

If companies aren’t so proactive, the alternative is scrambling to reconstruct contractual history during a crisis, and that’s exactly the kind of fire drill that no general counsel wants to manage. Some organizations have simply accepted that certain contracts are permanently lost. But that acceptance can introduce unmanageable risk. This simply shouldn’t happen. 

Your contracts should not only be visible, but useful 

The contract management technology that many contracting teams work with is a simple repository where the contracts are tagged with metadata, which can then be queried with a rudimentary search system. This approach works when everything is properly tagged and filed, but metadata tagging being a difficult, manual process, there are always errors.

But what if the approach could be different? 

Ivo Repository uses AI to extract information from contracts at scale, without requiring upfront metadata tagging. You can load your existing contracts from wherever they currently live and immediately begin querying them, identifying relationships between agreements, spotting historical changes in terms, and flagging potential risks or opportunities for renegotiation. Not only will you be able to find your contracts, but you’ll be able to get critical information out of them quickly and easily, without hours or days of manual work. 

Schedule a demo and see just how powerful Repository is, and whether it could solve the challenges your company is facing with contracting work.